June 27, 2015

Evolution of Continuous Delivery and DevOps
Ultimately engineering teams are employed to provide solutions to business problems. If your organisational structure is built around your technical platforms and your engineering teams are built around your organisational structure, the solutions they provide will in part solve business problems but mostly will try to compensate for organisational problems - this is by no means a new problem. When it comes to delivering value quickly and consistently there's nothing better than having everyone you need working together (say in the form of a cross-functional team) - as long as they have a consistent flow of work that they can all contribute to. The potential problem however is ensuring the work keeps everyone busy. Unless you have multi-skilled engineers (or engineers who are willing to simply muck in) things can become uneven and inefficient.


The Business Processes of Information Governance
Regardless of industry or line of business, an analogous quote can easily be made, be it selling shirts, producing pharmaceutical drugs, or buying and reselling products. The business processes that organizations put in place determine how efficiently and effectively companies conduct their work. These processes are often unique by industry, tailored to specific companies, and studied and improved via major initiatives and strategic investments. The business processes of information governance should be added to this list of differentiating, business value-driving processes. Indeed, highly effective organizations run highly effective business processes -- and information governance is no exception. To succeed, the business processes of information governance can be divided into six key areas:


How Will Businesses Change with Virtual Reality?
Virtual reality could also be meaningful to people with limited physical mobility as it would allow them to tour places they might not have otherwise been able to visit and do so by viewing actual video footage of real places. However, everyone might be interested in the ability of virtual reality to provide the realistic sights and sounds of faraway places. Combined with other sensory stimuli, such as a beach scent, light breeze, and some heat to simulate sunlight, virtual reality could allow you to create a fairly immersive, multi-sensory simulation of sitting on your favorite beach. While it would not be a real substitute, it might just be the next best thing.


TCS's Ignio can predict problems & automate: CEO N Chandrasekaran
It is a neuroscience-based self-learning platform. So if you take Ignio and you install it then the moment you put it into an environment, it sucks up the information about that environment and creates a context. If you take infrastructure context, it will know how many different kinds of hardware are there, how many different kinds of software are there. So it will learn about all the things about your infrastructure from the data that's already present in the your network. From an infrastructure point of view it has knowledge of the different infrastructure pieces that are there. Then what it does, is that it can automate.


Big Data and the Rise of Augmented Intelligence
Each year computers are getting faster, but at the same time we as humans are getting better at using them. The top chess players in the world are not humans OR computers, but combinations of humans AND computers. In this talk, Sean Gourley examines this world of augmented intelligence and shows how our understanding of the human brain is shaping the way we visualize and interact with big data. Gourley argues that the world we are living in is too complex for any single human mind to understand and that we need to team up with machines to make better decisions.


The rise of SSDs over hard drives, debunked
If there's one upgrade a consumer can make to a desktop or laptop computer that will make the greatest difference in performance, it's swapping in an SSD. NAND flash manufacturers such as Samsung, Toshiba, Micron, and Intel, have continued to shrink the lithography technology for making flash transistors. Last fall, at the Flash Memory Summit, Toshiba revealed its smallest lithography process for NAND flash with a 15-nanometer, 16GB MLC NAND wafer. The 15nm wafer was developed in partnership with SanDisk. Flash makers have also increased the number of bits -- from one to three -- that can be stored per NAND flash cell, all of which has increased density and reduced manufacturing costs.


Forget China, There’s An E-Commerce Gold Rush In Southeast Asia
The paucity of payment systems in the Southeast Asian is a case in point itself. Thanks to Alibaba and WeChat, COD decreased from more than 70 percent of total payments in 2008 to less than 21 percent recently in China during last year’s Singles’ Day mega sales (think Cyber Monday / Black Friday for China). Southeast Asia, however, doesn’t have an Alibaba or WeChat yet. Due to their size and reach, Alibaba and Tencent were able to turn their online payment methods into the de-facto standard for e-commerce in China. Southeast Asia is still fragmented. Until local financial institutions and/or e-commerce players get their act together in terms of payment platforms, COD will remain the dominant payment methods covering over 80 percent of total payments.


The Internet was a mistake, now let’s fix it
In fact, with government regulation and support, mathematically secure communication is eminently possible. Crypto theory says that a truly random key that is as long as the message being sent cannot be broken without a copy of the key. Imagine a world where telecommunication providers working under appropriate regulations issued physical media similar to passports containing sufficient random digital keys to transmit all of the sensitive information a household would share in a year or even a decade. We would effectively be returning to the model of traditional phone services where telecommunication companies managed the confidentiality of the transmission and government agencies could tap the conversations with appropriate (and properly regulated) court supervision.


The Pitfalls that You Should Always Avoid when Implementing Agile
An agile transformation is only likely to succeed if heavily supported on an ongoing basis by the management. It is also a prerequisite for a robust agile implementation that the management level is acting according to agile principles, and not only the project teams. ... Adopting agile will impose significant changes to an organization that may have worked according to traditional principles for maybe even 10 – 20 years or more. It may look simple but it is not. ... Top-level managers often do not see the necessity to involve themselves in projects on an ongoing basis. Yes, they allocate (a lot of) money to projects, and yes, they do get upset, when projects overspend or get delayed, but usually they do not see themselves as more than an escalation point for their Project Managers.


Will Google Artificial Intelligence Run An IT Help Desk?
The system can respond to questions, and have long, complex conversations with people. In tests, it was able to help users diagnose and fix computer problems, including Internet browser and password issues. The AI also taught itself how to respond to inquiries about morality and philosophy. The answers were coherent enough that you might mistake them for something your stoner roommate from college once said. ...  The machine is able to do this because it was designed to come up with an appropriate response based on context. “These predictions reflect the situational context because it's seen the whole occurrence of words and dialogue that's happened before it,” Jeff Dean, a Google senior fellow, said at a conference in March.



Quote for the day:

"The signs of outstanding leadership are found among the followers." -- Max DePree

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