May 03, 2013

Self-service business intelligence not a give-and-go affair
In an interview with Search Business Analytics, Eckerson expanded on the complexities of managing self-service BI initiatives and said that segmenting end users into separate groups and supporting different levels of functionality based on their varying needs can go a long way toward ensuring an effective implementation. In other words, one size fits all is not the path to self-service success. Excerpts from the interview follow:


Common Misconceptions About Touch
The visual target is the link text, icon, or other graphic element that affords an interaction. Visual targets need to be big enough and clear enough so: They attract the user's eye; The user understands that they are actionable elements; They are readable, and the user can understand what action they will perform; The user is confident that he can easily tap them.


Microsoft readies 'Mohoro' Windows desktop as a service
In yet another example of its growing emphasis on remaking itself as a devices and services company, Microsoft looks to be developing a pay-per-use "Windows desktop as a service" that will run on Windows Azure. The desktop virtualization service, codenamed Mohoro, is in a very early development phase, from what I've heard from sources. I don't know the final launch target, but I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't until the second half of 2014.


Insect-like flying robot developed at Harvard
The robot represents more than a decade of work by several teams of researchers. It can be traced back to work done by Wood when he was a graduate student at the Berkeley Biomimetic Millisystems Lab. The California lab was working on similar technology.


Are you a Weather Station?
A weather station is a department that tells you that it is raining when you are standing in the rain getting wet. This links to the whole conversation about portfolio management value and one of the reasons that portfolio offices get killed is because of lack of value. Being a weather station is a prime example of being as useful as last weeks newspaper. Here is a brain dump of 10 key indicators that your portfolio office is nothing more than a weather station:


Adobe's Lightroom app for iOS is yet another step to Post-PC
It suggests a future in which many of us won't even need a computer: We'll simply rent time on remote computers access to which is supplied as a service by software developers such as Adobe. That model means you might work on an image on your iPad and then send the edits to the remote Lightroom server farm. Your edits would be applied to the original (lossless) image and the results made available, probably online.


Can Firefox OS be the new Android?
"Firefox OS is not a proprietary platform, it is fully standards-based and built on HTML5," says Andreas Gal, Vice President, Mobile Engineering, Mozilla.
 "What's more, Firefox OS is not a new ecosystem - it is the Web and the Web is the largest existing ecosystem we have today."


YouTube™ Embedded Video Player: Extended API (C#)
This extended version of embedded YouTube™ API demonstrates additional customization features, namely: Setting the startup options; Selecting the item from the playlist; Setting the autoplay mode; Setting player's dimension (W/H); Changing the border options; Starting the video at predefined time


Beijing to add more prosecutors to curb cybercrime
To handle online cases, prosecutors should be able to analyze and examine online evidence, but this is a challenge for current prosecutors, Zhang Kai, a prosecutor from Chaoyang district, said in the report. However, many prosecutors are not knowledgeable about online fraud skills used by cybercriminals, which makes it difficult to solve such cases, Ma Shuang, another prosecutor from the Shijingshan district, noted, adding online evidence is "a key to lodge a prosecution, but is hard to find and inspect".


Australian Defence White Paper emphasises need for cybersecurity
"It might become evident that the risk of cyberattack is even greater than we had first thought, and so we might decide to build on a foundation in this area by further enhancing our cybersecurity capabilities," the 2009 paper predicted. However, the 2013 Defence White Paper (PDF) has a significantly different emphasis on these threats, highlighting it as a matter that has far-reaching consequences.



Quote for the day:

"Start by doing what is necessary, then do what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible." -- St. Francis of Assisi

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