Bluemix Watson Speech-To-Text Priority Option - ibm-cloud

Just wondering if there is a priority option for Watson's speech-to-text service that would yield faster translation results. We would be willing to pay a premium to receive the fastest results possible and just wondering if there are provisions for that kind of service.
I'm assuming not as I would expect it to be included on the price list, but if anyone is aware if this is available or if it might someday be available, I would be interested.
Thanks in advance.

The answer is NO.
In order to get faster translations make sure:
When calling /recognize, you are using WebSockets and not the REST API.
You network is not introducing significant latency (are you in the US?, china?)
You are sending the right amount of data. Sometimes there is no need to use a large sampling rate.

Related

BMC Remedy 9.1 REST API front end performance impacts

I understand this is a loaded question, however I am going to try my luck to see if anyone has info/documentation that I have been unable to locate thus far. Perhaps someone with a better understanding of REST API functionality could point me in the correct direction.
In looking to deploy Remedy 9.1, I am being told REST API will be disabled due to performance concerns of the front end application itself (web interface). I am trying to find out if there is any quality control or prioritization that occurs on the backend that would mitigate this concern.
I understand that there are some obvious savings in not having to dynamically render a webpage or engage the front end virtually at all when making a REST API call, so when pulling data its more lean 1 to 1 to use REST. However if someone where to be reckless with a REST API call, is the ARServer at all equipped to manage this request by assigning it low priority, or would it simply take down the whole system?
In a perfect world I would love if someone could point me to some specific documentation that has something close to a definitive answer either way.
Thanks for any help anyone may be able to send my way.
Deploy a server group, keep one server for the front end and one for the back end. Only make calls to the 'back end' server.
I think the bigger issue that is being avoided is that there are kinds of places for bottlenecks. If they are concerned about that, what guardrails do they have in place to protect from an overloaded database? Or a table lock? The REST API is just another client. There is only so much you can do to protect the system. Since it is another client, it has all the protections at the app level that exist for every other client. Indexing, requiring search criteria, threading, and other performance tactics will help regardless of the client.
RCJ has a good point in that you can dedicate servers in the server group (or even outside of it) to accommodate their needs. But you will always go back to the central database as the ultimate risk.

Maintaining reliable service state history

The Reliable Services Overview topic has a section, at the bottom, called When to use Reliable Services APIs. In there, one list item says:
Your application needs to maintain change history for its units of state*.
The star at the end is explained just a little bit further down:
* Features available at SDK general availability.
The SDK has reached general availability by now, but I cannot find any information about how to make use of the "Maintain change history for its units of state"-feature or even a suggestion of what that actually means.
I'm asking here, in hope that someone can shed any light on this. I'm interested in knowing whether this feature is indeed available, or if not when it is supposed to be available, or if it has been abandoned.
Some insights on the intended design and functionality of this feature would also be much appreciated.
It describes the scenarios in which you might use the reliable collections. It can be used to keep multiple versions of an object and build a history of changes. (like delta's or snapshots)
This way you can create an event source. (it would require some coding on your end though)
Unit of state: entry in the State manager

Is it possible to get stocktwits sentiment indicator for a ticker via API

I looked at the API documentation and it was not immediately apparent to me. Is it available via partner access?
Also, the default rolling average for sentiment seems to be 7 days. Is there an option to change this. One obvious way of doing this is parsing the firehose and some partners probably do that. I don't care for all that data or parsing it, in the unlikely scenario where I can get access to that.
The Sentiment data is only available to partners that license our API. Please touch base with us and let us know what you would like to do and about your paid product:
http://stocktwits.com/developers/contact
There currently is no option to change the rolling average, we have plans to add different time frames, as we agree this would be helpful.
We offer a financial sentiment API at Knowsis.
API docs are available here: http://knowsis.github.io

Task distribution for graph based data

I am learning to program distributed computing system. And the system I need to work on would require to perform computation on graph data (social network data) in parallel environment.
After searching on the internet, I come down to the issue regarding to the task distribution. It seems that many of such kind systems are designed by worker requesting task from master e.g. volunteer computing [1] or hadoop map/reduce transmit heartbeat.
My question is - is there any task distribution/ assignment is designed with the style in that the master would proactive assign task to slaves? What issues may need to pay attention to when programming such mechanism?
I think I may be wrong in some concepts that I am not aware of. So I appreciate any suggestions.
Thanks for advice.
[1]. boinc.berkeley.edu/heien_09.pdf
No, you're exactly right -- the master-wokrer pattern is well established. For a certain flavour of it, take a look here for a message-queue based system, or look it up on wikipedia.
Tim,
Thanks for providing that link. Although it talks about Microsoft solution, the information in the article is very useful, which serves as good keywords for me to search further information.
Thanks again for your help!

Old concepts with new names (namely REST and Cloud computing)

It seems that SaaS and Cloud computing are old concepts with new names, and I am curious if I am wrong.
For cloud computing you can look at: Difference between cloud computing and distributed computing?
Basically, it seems that when we have been hosting that that is cloud computing, it is just that now some companies have put in much great resources to ensure better uptime than my local ISP. But, it seems that there is nothing really new here.
For REST, it seems that it is what we have been doing with cgis for 15 years.
Here is a question on REST: What am I not understanding about REST?
It appears that REST is an old concept, and I am curious how it is different than has been done since the early days of the web, and, to a large extent, the early days of using telnet (which http is on top of).
Am I mistaken in my simplification of these? I try to see how what is new is like what I know so I can see what more has to be learned in that topic, but for cloud computing and REST it seems that very little needs to be learned.
You are both right and wrong. You are right in the sense that new ideas are normally similar to old ideas, and indeed cloud computing is based significantly on distributed computing.
What is new in cloud computing is
virtualization
self-service
With virtualization, you can run multiple operating systems on a single hardware. While that, in itself, isn't new, either, it was never considered in distributed systems as a relevant piece of the architecture. Using virtualization allows self-service: users can create their own clusters of nodes without the administrator of the hardware taking any action. This allows a significant acceleration of deployment, and a significant reduction of cost.
For ReST, what you are missing is the client API. It is true that on the server side, a ReST service can be implemented with CGI. What is new here is that it is not an end user which retrieves the URL, but a program.
Saying that HTTP is on top of telnet ignores realities; this is like saying that we made no progress since the introduction of copper wires for communication. Strictly speaking, HTTP is not in top of telnet, but on top of TCP (which telnet is also on top of, these days).
Considering Roy's dissertation coined the term REST back in 2000, you can definitely argue that there is nothing new about REST. Additionally, the REST architectural style was synthesized from successful existing practices, so REST implementations pre-date the definition. Having said that, there is nothing simple about designing REST interfaces. Ever since Netscape first abused cookies to allow servers to maintain session state people have been swimming upstream against the web.
REST's recent resurrection has come mainly from people becoming disillusioned with SOAP based Web Services. SOAP tried to hide HTTP instead of embracing it and I think people are starting to realize how effective HTTP can be as an distributed application protocol that can do more than just deliver HTML to web browsers.
RESTful web applications don't use session state, so one could argue that by that virtue alone it is different than most web applications in existence at the moment.
As for Cloud Computing, I find myself agreeing with Larry Ellison for once in my life.
I'm in agreement on what you've posted. You might consider making this community wiki since it's likely to garner many answers based on opinion. Cloud computing seems to have taken off as a buzzword, and this is largely due to a decrease in cost for mass quantities of hardware. And then there is REST which is really just a formal name and definition for something that has been in place for a long time. Some people like to encapsulate ideas with buzzwords and acronyms. Sometimes it's useful to put a name to an idea though.
Not only this, the concept of things being old concepts with new names is old. It's hard to be original these days :P
You are right about REST -- its mostly old concepts with a lot of added pedantry and not much added substance.
Cloud computing has a small but fundamental difference from distributed computing. In distributed computing you had servers dedicated to particular functions, and usually some sort of directory service to locate the correct server. In cloud computing any server is capable of any task and usually the servers queue up for work which is distributed from a central point.