March 02, 2014

Kanban at Scale – A Siemens Success Story
Continuous and evolutionary improvement would occur only once the redesign had been implemented. Once the new system was in place, Kanban would act as a catalyst for process improvement through visualization of the work-units and the associated metrics, which would identify waste, variability and, bottle-necks. However, this type of continuous improvement could only occur once we achieved much higher levels of predictability, and this could only happen once the Kanban method including WIP limits had been fully implemented


App Listens for Danger When You’re Not Paying Attention
The crux of One Llama’s technology is what the company calls its “artificial ear.” When sound enters your ear, it travels through the spiral-shaped cochlea, which is lined with tiny hair cells that vibrate like tuning forks when hit by certain frequencies. One Llama’s artificial ear is a software version of this—essentially, a bank of digital tuning forks that measure sounds. It’s based on work that cofounder David Tcheng and others conducted at the University of Illinois, where he is a research scientist. The company claims this method can be speedier and more flexible than other common methods for analyzing the different frequencies of the vibrations that we hear as sounds.


The Magick Behind ImageMagick
ImageMagick consists of nearly a half million lines of C code and optionally depends on several million lines of code in dependent libraries (e.g. JPEG, PNG, TIFF libraries). Given that, one might expect a huge architecture document. However, a great majority of image processing is simply accessing pixels and its metadata and our simple, elegant, and efficient implementation makes this easy for the ImageMagick developer. We discuss the implementation of the pixel cache and getting and setting image properties and profiles in the next few sections.


5 Ways to Improve Your PCI Compliance Program
While PCI is no guarantee that you won't experience a data breach, Simonetti says organizations should think of PCI compliance like a seatbelt: It won't prevent you from crashing, but it may well save you if you do. PCI DSS is a set of international security standards created and maintained by the PCI Security Standards Council (SSC) in an effort to ensure that merchants and service providers appropriately protect CHD, whether from a debit card, credit card, store card or company purchasing card.


Augmented Reality Gets to Work
There’s also hope that augmented reality can make things easier for workers who are away from the office or the factory. Gabriel Weiss, who oversees augmented reality projects at Mitsubishi Electric, says the company is using software from augmented reality software company Metaio on Epson’s Moverio smart glasses to test whether air conditioner service technicians benefit from a three-dimensional overlay that shows them the components of the company’s most popular residential air conditioner.


Custom Assertions in Java Tests
Having a more powerful set of assertions provided by AssertJ or Hamcrest is nice, but this is not really what we wanted in the case of our HourRange class. Another feature of matcher libraries is that they allow you to write your own assertions. These custom assertions will behave exactly as the default assertions of AssertJ do – i.e. you will be able to chain them together. And this is exactly what we will do next to improve our test. We will see a sample implementation of a custom assertion in a minute, but for now let's take a look at the final effect we are going to achieve.


How Stable are Your Unit Tests? Best Practices to Raise Test Automation Quality
Part of the above failure is that for test automation to perform within expectations, JVM instances are usually reused, at least within the same project. Therefore ideally unit tests should have no side effects on their test environment, to prevent such failures. The test environment includes various resources that can influence tests executed afterwards, such as creating files on the file system or as in the case above, altering Java system properties. For files, JUnit offers the TemporaryFolder rule to create temporary files, so we built a similar mechanism for properties.


Tackling the ongoing problem of endpoint defense
Next to perhaps only firewalls, endpoint security figures as the network world's oldest defense. But while its history is old, the basic problem of protecting the PC on the desk has never fully been solved. Rather, the difficulty has increased as the number and kinds of endpoints multiply, particularly with the rise of mobility in the majority of endpoint devices and increase in the sophistication of the attacks. In this Essential Guide, learn everything you need to know to develop or refresh your enterprise endpoint strategy.


BrightCloud Threat Intelligence Services and Endpoint Breach Protection Solution
"At Webroot, we reject the prevailing notion that organizations cannot be protected from attacks on their endpoint devices. We believe that most internet security problems can be addressed if the business can apply comprehensive security knowledge at that moment of truth when they are faced with a threat," said Mike Malloy, executive vice president of products and strategy at Webroot. "Both BrightCloud Security Services and the BreachLogic Endpoint Agent are designed to enable businesses to take action more quickly by combining our vast threat intelligence and continuous monitoring of events in their environment."


Adaptive Computing Introduces Big Workflow to Accelerate Insights
While current solutions solve big data challenges with only cloud or only HPC, Adaptive Computing utilizes all available resources—including bare metal and virtual machines, technical computing environments (e.g., HPC, Hadoop), cloud (public, private, and hybrid) and even agnostic platforms that span multiple environments, such as OpenStack—as a single ecosystem that adapts as workloads demand. Traditional IT operates in a steady state, with maximum uptime and continuous equilibrium. Big data interrupts this balance, creating a logjam to discovery.



Quote for the day:

"Only 2 words always lead to success. Yes & no. You've mastered saying yes. So start practicing saying no" -- Jack Canfield

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