January 22, 2015

BlueData's on a mission to democratize big data
BlueData is the only solution built from the ground up and focused on big data applications. The BlueData vision is to allow our customers to take our software, install it on hardware in their own data center, and within a few hours have their own private big data cloud platform akin to Amazon EMR up and running. This would allow data scientists to individually stand up their own virtual clusters and then run their jobs directly. Other approaches on the market are mere band-aids. Our solution helps companies focus on analyzing the data without the burden of complex infrastructure or the challenge and risk of moving their data.


An outlandish Top 10 of cybersecurity events in 2014
“Threat landscape” is a common phrase used in cybersecurity. It governs whether companies choose to buy new hardware or to spend money protecting existing infrastructure. Dependence is direct: If your trains get derailed all the time, buying new locomotives isn’t a solution. ... Our Threatpost site follows all the meaningful news regarding IT security. We decided to pick the top 10 events of the past year by a single criterion: the popularity of the corresponding articles. The results were interesting. There was no politics (no Snowden, no NSA) and few topics of strategic nature. The problems that stand out are those that have to be considered when assessing the threat landscape right now.


The Business of Managing IT: The Open Group IT4IT™ Forum
Quoting industry luminary Marc Andreessen, Betz says “software is eating the world.” Similarly, Betz says, IT management is actually beginning to eat management, too. Although this might seem laughable, we have become increasingly dependent on computing systems in our everyday lives. With that dependence comes significant concerns about the complexity of those systems and the potential they carry for chaotic behaviors. Therefore, he says, as technology becomes pervasive, how IT is managed will increasingly dictate how businesses are managed. “If IT is increasing in its proportion of all product management, and all markets are increasingly dependent on managing IT, then understanding pure IT management becomes critically important not just for IT but for all business management,” Betz says.


Are Your Business Applications Unnecessarily Complex?
The good news is that real-world HTAP applications are now available, with many more to come in 2015. In a recent article, Information Week’s Doug Henschen called out the transaction/analytical convergence as one of the top five trends in enterprise applications this year: As SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner has observed, the separation of transactional and analytical apps is unnatural. The practice became entrenched decades ago only because the technologies available at the time couldn’t handle both at once. Cloud, mobile, and in-memory capabilities are putting these worlds back together. The best current example of HTAP architecture in action is the recently announced SAP Simple Finance application.


Building and deploying large-scale machine learning pipelines
While primitives can serve as building blocks, one still needs tools that enable users to build pipelines. Workflow tools have become more common, and these days, such tools exist for data engineers, data scientists, and even business analysts (Alteryx, RapidMiner, Alpine Data, Dataiku). As I noted in a recent post, we’ll see more data analysis tools that combine an elegant interface with a simple DSL that non-programmers can edit. At some point, DSL’s to encode graphs that represent these pipelines will become common. The latest release of Apache Spark (version 1.2) comes with an API for building machine learning pipelines (if you squint hard enough, it has the makings of a DSL for pipelines).


Big visions for 5G before the FCC
The International Telecommunications Union, an agency of the United Nations, is holding a World Radio Communication Conference in Geneva in November that will help establish international spectrum and technology requirements for 5G for 2020 and beyond. Hoping to get an early start, the FCC has set Feb. 17 as the deadline for making what it calls "reply" comments in addition to the initial comments that were due Jan. 15. The FCC is actively encouraging reply comments from citizens of all types, not just large companies. Comments can be made by going to the FCC website and clicking on item 14-177 and filling in the short comment form. All comments will be made public.


Best practices for an enterprise Android deployment
Enterprise mobility is constantly changing, and the recent rise of trends like BYOD are broadening the idea of what it means to be a mobile-savvy organization. Big businesses no longer have the option to pick and choose how they will engage mobile, and that especially applies to Android. "Mobility is about putting data and computing in the hands of your employees so that they can use the technologies of their choice to better do their work," said Ojas Rege, VP of strategy for MobileIron. "An organization will have to support Android in order to get the maximum benefit from their mobility strategy."


Why CIOs and developers are seldom on the same page - and why that's a good thing
The developers are looking for ways to solve their problems or, if not solve problems and the challenges they need to address, then at least make their life easier. That isn't necessarily something that the CIO looks for." A CIO is probably weighing up the larger picture, along with factors such as security, costs, and maintainability. ... "But the thing is with these frameworks, you don't know what's going to happen in a year from now, whether that framework is going to be there, whether it's going to be maintained and available to do the same stuff they're doing today as efficiently."


Critical Java updates fix 19 vulnerabilities, disable SSL 3.0
The number of attacks that exploit Java vulnerabilities to install malware on computers has been on a steady decline over the past year, but Java exploits remain one of the top attack vectors against Web users, according to a report released Tuesday by Cisco Systems. Another security-related change in the new Java updates is the deactivation of the SSL 3.0 protocol by default in response to the POODLE vulnerabilitydiscovered in October. The flaw allows man-in-the-middle attackers to decrypt sensitive information like authentication cookies from a connection encrypted with SSL 3.0.


Make Agents, Not Frameworks
And to make things worse - when using the suggested approach of runtime generation - the LoggingService cannot be instantiated directly either as the Java compiler does not know about the runtime-generated class. For this reason, frameworks such as Spring or Hibernate use object factories and do not allow for direct instantiation of objects that are considered to be a part of their framework logic. With Spring, creating objects by a factory comes naturally as all of Spring's objects are already managed beans which are to be created by the framework in the first place. Similarly, most Hibernate entities are created as a result of a query and are thus not instantiated explicitly.



Quote for the day:

"The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow." -- Rupert Murdoch

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