Tech Bytes - Daily Digest: 2012

December 31, 2012

Brief Introduction to Aspect Oriented Programming
Aspect Oriented Programming, or AOP, refers to this type of functional requirements as cross-cutting concerns and is designed specifically to address this issue: if such requirements are met by coding the cross-cutting concern into objects throughout the system, we can easily end up with a messy, hard-to-maintain implementation split across many objects.

Would You Want To Use Your NFC-Enabled Phone As Car Keys?
Hyundai's Connectivity Concept, which won't actually go into production until around 2015, aims to harness the power of your NFC phone to make it way cooler than your keys ever were. Not only could the phone unlock your car and start it, but it could also save a sort of user profile, flipping to the right radio station or streaming music while adjusting the seat and mirrors for you as soon as you slam it into the dashboard dock.

Building a Business-Aware Cloud Solution
There are three key areas that enable business awareness. The business process area includes the business functions, related-activities, and the individual tasks that must be performed in order to generate the desired business results. The business role(s) area includes the concatenation (grouping) of business activities into responsibilities that can be competently accomplished. Finally, business awareness also requires an understanding how an industry operates and how it is influenced by local, national and global economics.

How to Handle a Manipulative Employee
Most employees really do want to do a good job, but sometimes you run into a few who would rather not bother. Here are five phrases that serve as "warning signs" that an employee is trying to manipulate you, along with advice on how to turn the tables.

Sure, Big Data Is Great. But So Is Intuition.
Claudia Perlich, chief scientist at Media6Degrees, an online ad-targeting start-up in New York, puts the problem this way: “You can fool yourself with data like you can’t with anything else. I fear a Big Data bubble.” The bubble that concerns Ms. Perlich is not so much a surge of investment, with new companies forming and then failing in large numbers.

5 Reasons 2012 Was a Great Year for Linux
The end of the year is always a good time to take stock of where things stand in any niche or field, and Linux is no exception. There's no doubt that there have been challenges for the free and open source operating system over the course of 2012--the Secure Boot challenge A comes immediately to mind--but so, too, have there been numerous successes.

The Most Misunderstood Aspect Of Great Leadership
A leader simply operates at their best when they understand their ability to influence is much more fruitful than their ability to control. Here’s the thing – the purpose of leadership is not to shine the spotlight on yourself, but to unlock the potential of others so they can in turn shine the spotlight on countless more. Control is about power – not leadership. Surrender allows a leader to get out of their own way and focus on adding value to those whom they serve.

Why Wasn’t 2012 The Year Of The G-Cloud?
Despite the tidal wave of interest in the Cloud, CloudStore, the government’s new initiative for procuring cloud services, also known as the G-Cloud, has been slow to catch on since its launch in February 2012. Considering its anticipated benefits, including ease of sourcing and procurement which offer a projected savings of up to £180 million by 2015, the government is hoping this is simply a matter of being slow off the starting block. This article looks at who is actually using G-Cloud, who isn’t and why not.

Is cloud threat for SMB channel partners?
According to Miglani, cloud computing cuts two ways for small SMB channel partners. It allows them to offer new kinds of services and solutions to their SMB customers without having to incur high initial capital expenditures. But automated service delivery via the cloud will also reduce the need for internal IT staff. As a result, SMB channel partners could lose more than 200,000 IT jobs over the next decade, said AMI Partners’ recent Cloud Computing Research studies.

Simon: Open-Source Speech Recognition
After years of hard work, the Simon team is proud to announce the new major release: Simon 0.4.0. This new version of the open source speech recognition system Simon features a whole new recognition layer, context-awareness for improved accuracy and performance, a dialog system able to hold whole conversations with the user and more.

Quote for the day:

"The ability to summon positive emotions during periods of intense stress lies at the heart of effective leadership." — -- Jim Loehr

December 30, 2012

Optimizing the cloud for the BYOD movement
Bring your own device (BYOD) policies complicate cloud because they limit a company's ability to optimize application delivery to a single platform -- a major benefit of cloud adoption. There are ways, however, to optimize the cloud so enterprises don't have to choose between either a cloud project or BYOD.

BPM Patterns & Practices in Industry
Download this complimentary whitepaper to find out how Financial Services, Communications, Utilities and Retail customers have adopted business process management, employed best practices, and addressed the pertinent process challenges within their industry to deliver relevant business value.

Resilient Systems - Survivability of Software Systems
What is important to understand about resilience is that failure is expected and is inherent in any systems or processes, which might be triggered due to changes to the platform, environment and data. While Reliability is about the system’s robustness of not failing, Resilience is its ability to sense or detect failures ahead and then prevent it from encountering such events that lead to failure and when it cannot be avoided, allow it to happen and then recover from the failure sooner.

Risk Management Resolutions for 2013
Risks today are interconnected and horizontal, running across departments and business units. In conversations with CEOs, board members and banking executives, there are a few key overlapping risk areas that are most top of mind going into 2013.

Persistence is the Key
Calvin is a C++ persistence library or framework that allows programmers to easily save and load objects using keys. Objects are associated with a user configurable type of key that can be used to name objects specifically and save them or load them by that name. This feature is the primary distinguishing difference between Calvin and the many other persistent libraries.

5 enterprise cloud predictions for 2013
The mega Internet sites and applications are the new era enterprises. These will become the role models for the traditional enterprise. IT needs remain the same with regards to scale, security, SLA, etc. However, the traditional enterprise CIO has already set the goal for next year: 100% efficiency.

The Worst Security Mishaps of 2012
Every year security breaches have been of great annoyance to corporate and enterprises. And this year, there was not much of a difference. The year 2012 was of total mayhem. From hacker exploits to bad corporate behavior, 2012 was simply a plethora of security breaches. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the worst mishaps that marked in the year 2012.

Tools for Building Advanced Media Applications
In the recently concluded //Build/, Mike Downey, Principal Evangelist, Media Platform at Microsoft examined the tools and frameworks that are responsible for the development of Windows 8 apps that feature advanced media playback functionality such as streaming, DVR controls, advertising, and closed captioning. He also demonstrates the role of Microsoft Media Player Framework, which is employed behind the scenes for various live online streaming events.

Reduce Your Breach Risk: File Integrity Monitoring for PCI DSS Compliance and Data Security
This paper discusses the importance of file integrity monitoring (FIM), which facilitates the detection of attacks by cybercriminals, as well as insider threats that may result in costly data breaches. It also discusses file integrity monitoring as a critical component of Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance, and shows how NetIQ addresses both security and compliance challenges through the NetIQ Identity and Security Management family of products.

5 Epic Tech Fails in 2012
Google+ leads tech journalist John Brandon's list of this year's five worst technology failures for its inability to gain traction as a social media service even as Facebook and Twitter continue to boom. 3D projectors also made the list for becoming a clunky tool at business meetings instead of a slick one, as did Bluetooth watches for doing the same things the smartphones already do. Rounding out the end of the list were Klout scores and Dropbox

Quote for the day:

"A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week." -- George Patton

December 29, 2012

Private cloud computing planning from concept through deployment
Creating a blueprint on what your company expects to get out of cloud computing, getting buy-in from all departments, automating IT workloads, and transitioning to a self-service model are the initial steps in creating a private cloud. But the journey doesn't stop there. Let's take a look at the five final steps, including initiating chargeback, bolstering security and monitoring cloud performance, to help you with planning so you can create a fully functioning private cloud in your enterprise.

What Is a Real-Time Enterprise?
Originally the term real-time was only applied to systems that were reactive within a given time frame. They had very definite operational constraints. So, process control systems which might, for example, be controlling the speed of a production line had to make specific decisions within a given time frame. If they were too slow, the whole operation would grind to a halt, so speed of execution was critical.

Apache Crunch: A Java Library for Easier MapReduce Programming
Crunch provides a library of patterns to implement common tasks like joining data, performing aggregations, and sorting records. Unlike those other tools, Crunch does not impose a single data type that all of its inputs must conform to. Instead, Crunch uses a customizable type system that is flexible enough to work directly with complex data such as time series, HDF5 files, Apache HBase tables, and serialized objects like protocol buffers or Avro records.

How to Effectively Audit Your IT Infrastructure
Native Microsoft auditing tools lack the abilities of convenient tracking and ongoing review of changes in systems and applications putting organizations at risk of losing control over security. Unauthorized, unwanted, and malicious changes in an IT infrastructure can have tremendous impact on business continuity and predictability.

Storage and PaaS shine in cloud computing adoption spotlight
Cloud computing adoption goes far beyond the choice of public, private or hybrid models. Enterprise IT pros and administrators also need to decide on the specific services each cloud model provides. And certain trends are starting to emerge with regards to how IT departments are utilizing cloud services. Storing data in the cloud, as well as SaaS and PaaS, are the clear winners so far.

Data Center Power: Zooming in Where it Matters
By shifting attention from the cooling systems to the servers which account for the majority of the power consumed in the data center, managers can introduce a holistic energy optimization solution. Accurate monitoring of power consumption and thermal patterns creates a foundation for enterprise-wide decision-making with the ability to Monitor and analyze power data by server, rack, row or room, Track usage for logical groups of resources that correlate to the organization or data center services ...

Imperfect leadership
So if you focus on perfection, you will get discouraged, because perfection seldom happens and never happens for long. Or you will choke, trying too hard. Or you might freeze, engulfed by fear. Aim for perfection and bank on discouragement, dissatisfaction, broken relationships, frustration and worse.

Google's Enterprise Chief: We're Going To Grab 90% Of Office Users Away From Microsoft
Google ramped up its enterprise business in several ways this year. It launched a full-on "infrastructure-as-a-service" cloud, Compute Engine, that competes head on with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. It introduced Drive, which let's Google App users store any type of document in the cloud. It eliminated the free version of its Google Apps, and is now charging companies with 10 employees or less. It launched the next-generation of Chromebooks and introduced its first ever PC-like device for businesses, the Chromebox.

IDC Sees US Public IT Cloud Services To Top $43 Billion by 2016
Revenue for US public IT cloud services will grow from $18.5 billion in 2011 to $43.2 billion in 2016, according to a report by International Data Corporation (IDC). The report focuses on the public cloud services that are shared among unrelated enterprises and consumers and that are designed for a market, rather than just one enterprise.

The C# Memory Model in Theory and Practice
This is the first of a two-part series that will tell the long story of the C# memory model. The first part explains the guarantees the C# memory model makes and shows the code patterns that motivate the guarantees; the second part will detail how the guarantees are achieved on different hardware architectures in the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.

Quotes for the day:

"Leadership is an opportunity to serve. It is not a trumpet call to self-importance." -- J. Donald Walters

"Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win." -- Jonathan Kozol

December 28, 2012

The Power of Business Rules Management
The use of these Business Rules Management Systems(BRMS) to support the practice of decision management to automate and manage high-volume, transactional decisions is growing rapidly. A new standard, called the Decision Model and Notation standard, is under development that will bring consistency of representation to the industry.

One-on-one with Randy Bias: Cloud standards and the battle for control
In this one-on-one interview, Randy Bias, co-founder and chief technology officer of open source cloud infrastructure provider Cloudscaling, talks about the lack of cloud standards among providers and how today's cloud computing service provider patchwork will ultimately give way to a more uniform cloud universe.

Is culture your company’s most important asset?
Most managers can easily reframe key messages in ways that demonstrate care, that encourage employees, and that make employees feel heard and valued. The trick is to invite employee opinion, then refine behaviors to better serve their needs — and, in the process, create a safe, inspiring work culture.

Analysis: Amazon, Google on collision course in 2013

"Amazon wants to be the one place where you buy everything. Google wants to be the one place where you find everything, of which buying things is a subset," said Chi-Hua Chien, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. "So when you marry those facts I think you're going to see a natural collision."

It's "locking" if it's blocking
"Atomic" (only) means that nobody will mess up the state midway through the operation. "Atomic" doesn't mean, for example, that a single instruction is used - in fact, often it's not the case. Nor does "atomic" imply "lock-free". An implementation of atomic addition could legitimately use:

Wearable Computers the Size of Buttons to Monitor Health
In just the latest of many recent developments, the University of Texas at Dallas, in a new press release, notes that patients who require continuous observation of their medical condition—for example, to see if they're taking their medications on time—could benefit substantially from button-sized wireless computers to monitor a person’s health.

Better Integrate IT Risk Management With Enterprise Risk Activities
"By aligning IT GRC with its cousins in financial and legal GRC, organizations can accelerate GRC program growth and maturity to better realize the value of information risk management and its disproportionately high impact on operational risk management," says Ben Tomhave, senior consultant for security consultancy LockPath.

How to choose between scale-up vs. scale-out architectures for backup and recovery
More and more organizations are reducing or eliminating the use of tape by deploying disk-based appliances that use deduplication. But the architectural approach used by the appliance vendor can make a significant difference to the performance, scalability and total cost of the selected solution.

A Proposal to Enhance the UML Notation
Requirements and test cases, in particular acceptance tests, are strictly related. Agile methodologies highlight this aspect basing themselves on test driven approaches. The notation of UML use cases may be enhanced in order to allow enhanced UML tools to properly handle links between use cases and tests.

Are project forecasters “fools or liars”
“Estimates are commonly poor predictors of the actual value and viability of projects, and cannot be trusted as the basis for informed decision-making,” Professor Bent Flyvbjerg says. “These forecasts frequently misinform decision makers on projects instead of informing them. Some of the inaccuracy comes from genuine forecasting mistakes arising from over-optimism, but some estimates are deliberately misleading, designed to secure financial or political support for a project.”

Quote for the day:

"A good leader is a person who takes a little more than his share of the blame and a little less than his share of the credit." -- John C Maxwell

December 27, 2012

Emerging Enterprise Architecture Drives 10 Trends for 2013
The driving force behind the top trends of 2013 is the continued, and accelerating, emergence of the Boundary-free Enterprise™ - a framework and architecture based on loosely-coupled IT and Business services, technologies, and operations that are in turn enabled and driven by Cloud-based innovation.

Is the public cloud the best place for legacy applications?
If an application is due for a refresh, why settle for just a facelift via an incremental hardware upgrade or new GUI? Instead, why not go whole hog and re-platform the application on a state-of-the-art cloud platform that delivers scalable performance, flexibility and resilience—not to mention an operational expenditure (opex) rather than capital expenditure (capex) model?

Next-Generation Wi-Fi: As Fast as We'll Need?
The latest generation of 802.11, 802.11ac, is slated to be officially approved by the end of 2013. It's expected to bring further diminution of wired infrastructure within areas such as manufacturing floors and campus uses. The faster 802.11ac technology will also likely boost aggregate performance of legacy Wi-Fi networks, and its wider channels could deliver more data to end devices.

Changing Perceptions of Big Data
Business requirements are moving toward resolving how business wants to use Big Data solutions rather than allowing technical platforms to dictate use cases. The use of the technology platforms is more about how a particular use case in a Big Data initiative should be addressed rather than starting with a technology platform and working out what can be done within its limitations.

Moving to SaaS? Five Considerations for Your Application Integration Strategy
The first few years of this decade have seen consumers develop an unprecedented level of interest in the power of connecting devices. For instance, the integration on a smartphone can be mind-boggling. Your phone, camera, email, contacts, calendar, Internet searches, mapping software and even social networks and restaurant review applications are all connected. Integration is seamless, personal and transparent.

How To Handle Personality Conflicts At Work
At some point in our professional lives, most of us will have to deal with people we just don’t like or can’t seem to get along with. A clash of personalities is most likely at the root of these conflicts. Despite our best efforts, we sometimes just can’t seem to make it work. The unfortunate result is that the quality and enjoyment of our work suffers, and our stress levels skyrocket. In most cases when personality conflicts happen in the workplace, the entire team is disrupted as well.

BookLog: The Dip by Seth Godin
Every new project (or job, or hobby, or company) starts out exciting and fun. Then it gets harder and less fun, until it hits a low point-really hard, and not much fun at all. And then you find yourself asking if the goal is even worth the hassle. Maybe you’re in a Dip-a temporary setback that will get better if you keep pushing. But maybe it’s really a Cul-de-Sac, which will never get better, no matter how hard you try.

It's not all about the cloud: Why hybrid ITSM is here to stay
For companies that use some cloud-based applications, or need to cover branch offices and other sites that have few or no IT resources, a cloud-based ITSM offering may well make sense. But for enterprises that run the vast majority of their applications in-house, or that have lots of custom requirements, an in-house ITSM offering is likely the better choice. To cover both, then, enterprises need an ITSM solution that can deal with both worlds; in other words, a hybrid ITSM strategy.

Developing That Connected Space Between The Cloud And Everything Else
Yoics hits on a huge problem. The gap between device manufacturers is enormous. Each smartphone maker has different ways they configure their devices. Further, the cloud in its current form is not meant to accommodate networking between devices and their respective features. And it’s why the definition of that space between the cloud and everything else represents one of the biggest opportunities for the new year and well beyond.

Assessing Risk Management Culture to Better Understand the Characteristics of ERM Programs
“Risk management should be an influencing stakeholder regarding certain compensation decisions, i.e., risk management targets in areas outside risk management and weighting of the risk management segment in balanced scorecards. Additionally, risk management should sign-off on all new product/new business decisions” says Graham.

Quote for the day:

"Nothing can add more power to your life than concentrating all of your energies on a limited set of targets." -- Nido Qubein

December 26, 2012

Strategy Implementation (Balanced Scorecard)
The improvement of the effectiveness of companies’ strategic management process will be maintained by eliminating the disconnection between the formulation of strategy and its effective implementation throughout the organization. The key issues identified for the disconnection are discussed in this article

As BYOD catches on, IT sector gets ready for 1m malicious apps
Reports published by Trend Micro and McAfee maintained that as the number of people bringing their own devices to work turns from a trickle to flood, security challenges from using multiple devices would also multiply. These challenges multiply in the face of a breakdown of a hitherto homogenous computing culture dominated by Windows and Blackberrys.

How IT Pros Can Improve Their Interpersonal Skills
Remember that the "suits" and "techies" are going to mix about as well as oil and water. That's OK. They don't have to best friends and get together every weekend for a barbecue or Star Trek marathon. But those differing cultures can't be used as an excuse to avoid working together. Consider having IT employees shadow department managers at work to become more comfortable interacting with them.

Apache Camel: Enterprise Integration Patterns
Camel supports most of the Enterprise Integration Patterns from the excellent book by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf. If you are new to Camel you might want to try the Getting Started in the User Guide before attempting to implement these patterns. The EIP icons library is available as a Visio stencil file adapted to render the icons with the Camel color : sand.

Digital Citizens Group Focuses on Internet Safety
The new Digital Citizens campaign, launched Thursday, will also strive to shed light on the online sale of counterfeit goods, including prescription drugs, and on pirated Web content, said Tom Galvin, executive director of the new group. Digital Citizens will investigate online scams by showing how people can get fooled -- for example, one of the first projects will be to purchase counterfeit drugs from online pharmacies, he said.

The Employee-Motivation Checklist
Through many years of research, trial and error, and working with companies of all sizes in numerous industries, Dave has identified 16 critical ways to motivate your employees, which are listed in this article. Learn these techniques and adapt as many as possible in your business.

10 predictions how cloud computing will transform traditional IT in 2013

Kevin and Cary predict IT will undergo 10 transformational, cloud-related impacts in 2013 -- effects so massive that they will be the most fundamental changes to the way businesses and governments have approached technology in the past 25 years:

India aims for world's big data
In its report "Big data: The next big thing", Indian IT services industry group Nasscom expects the country's big data industry to grow from US$200 million in 2012 to US$1 billion in 2015. The biggest challenge--and opportunity--is to satisfy the demand for data scientists. Avendus Capital, for one, estimates the United States will suffer a shortage of up to 200,000 data scientists by 2018, a gap that will most likely be filled by outsourcing.

Nine Forms of Analytics Data That Matter the Most
Big Data takes a lot of forms and shapes, and flows in from all over the place – from the Internet, from devices, from machines, and even from cars. In all the data being generated are valuable nuggets of information. The challenge is being able to find the right data needed, and being able to employ that data to solve a business challenge. What types of data are worthwhile for organizations to capture?

IBM unveils IBM Connections, a new social analytics software
IBM has unveiled new software and services that bring the power of big data analytics into the hands of today's social savvy workforce anytime, anywhere. Now, organizations can apply analytics to their social business initiatives, allowing them to gain actionable insight on information generated on networks and put it to work in real-time.

Quote for the day:

"A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder." -- Thomas Carlyle

December 24, 2012

Cloud-Powered GPS Chip Slashes Smartphone Power Consumption
A Microsoft Research project suggests that there’s a way for location chips inside smartphones to use far less power. Reducing the power consumption of GPS chips could not only extend the battery life of smartphones and tablets, it could also make it practical to add GPS functionality to more devices, including low-power remote sensors.

Excel: Data Model specification and limits
A data model is embedded data inside a workbook that powers data visualizations such as PivotTable, PivotChart, and Power View reports. This article documents the maximum and configurable limits for Excel workbooks that contain data models.

5 myths that hold back brainpower
Deepak Chopra and Rudolph E. Tanzi, explain that new discoveries and new thinking are helping people create a new “relationship” with their brains that help unveil new perceptions and new opportunities. In their latest book, Super Brain: Unleashing the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-Being, they explain that people need to acknowledge their roles as “leaders,” “inventors,” ‘teachers,” and “users” to their brains.

The Innovator's Straitjacket
A person in a straitjacket also loses the ability to do many other things, particularly creative tasks that require typing, drawing, manipulating objects, and so on. Even the sanest of companies can unintentionally put themselves in a straitjacket that makes it hard for them to create high-potential new growth opportunities. Here's how leaders unintentionally limit their innovation efforts.

Despite Apple, NFC is catching on -- just not for payments quite yet
Near Field Communication (NFC) is steadily making headway in the U.S. for sharing data and music among smartphones, but the technology faces years of slow growth as a replacement for physical wallets.

India's Lava aims for 100 mobile app patents
In an Economic Times report Sunday, SN Rai, the company's co-founder and director, said: "We have realized just by selling handsets it is not possible to maintain growth momentum. Innovation in product is key to survival. Our wishlist is to make a century of patents in the next 2 to 3 years."

4 Fantastic, Free Things Google Drive Will Now Do For You
Now, however, would be a good time to pay Drive some mind. Google has done impressive work making it easier to keep your files organized, share any file with anyone, and keep everything in your work life one search away. Very specifically, these are the things Drive can do for you at no cost, and requiring just enough effort to remember Drive can do that.

Splunktalk: Getting the Message from MOM
In many respects you can think of MOM as the glue that stitches heterogeneous enterprise computing environments together. Now why am I so interested in this ? Well, MOM and the messages transported represent a massive source of machine data that Splunk can index and resolve into operational visibility on many different levels..core operations , business analytics, transaction tracing etc..

Taking Healthcare IT Seriously Demands Culture Changes
Healthcare is moving cautiously into cloud computing, virtualization, BYOD and other IT innovations. And there's good reason for the caution. Until an organization's IT leaders take meaningful steps to change what's typically seen as a lackadaisical privacy and security culture, the risk of patient-information loss remains high and costly.

Boost up your serialization/deserialization similar to JSON

MessagePack is effectively JSON, but with efficient binary encoding. Like JSON, there is no type checking or schemas, which depending on your application can be either be a pro or a con. But, if you are already streaming JSON via an API or using it for storage, then MessagePack can be a drop-in replacement.

How Object Storage and Information Dispersal Address Big Data Challenges
Object-based storage offers an alternative approach that is ideally suited for storing massive amounts of unstructured data. Object-based storage systems are not organized hierarchically. Instead, an object is identified and located by its unique identifier. This enables the number of objects to grow substantially beyond the limitation of traditional file systems while still maintaining the integrity and consistency of the data

Quote for the day:

"The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows" -- Aristotle Onassis

December 23, 2012

SANS Netwars Tests Cybersecurity Pros Against Peers
The competition is both educational and fun, said Jorge Orchilles, manager of the infrastructure vulnerability assessment team at Citi Global Security Operations. Orchilles participated in the competition last week and finished in third place in a NetWars competition in 2011.

The CloudTimes Year in Review – And 2013 Cloud Predictions

The question now should focus on what will happen to the data that we store on public clouds by 2013. There are a lot of moves that are supposed to protect our data but we all know that technology is moving faster than legislation. Let’s take a look the possibilities on how public clouds, such as social media, will use our data.

The Leadership Brand: How to Discover Your Personal Brand Persona
To help you discover your brand persona, Todd Nielsen lists twelve of the most common archetypes into which leaders fit and included examples from the 2011 TIME 100 list of leaders. These types vary based on personality, style of leadership and a number of other things.

Does disaster risk management pay?
A new study, published last week in the journal Risk Analysis, provides a new methodology based on Cost-Benefit analysis to assess the economic efficiency of disaster risk reduction efforts in disaster hot spots in developing and emerging economies. Faced with fiscal austerity, many national and international policymakers have increasingly become interested in the economic case for disaster risk management.

BYOD, Enterprise Mobility and Beyond – What to expect in 2013
Interestingly enough for Trend Micro – the company that has made the “Journey to the Cloud” its corporate mantra – Raimund’s top two predictions are not related to the cloud but rather to the inevitable impact of consumer mobile platforms on corporate IT – a topic particularly relevant to the Consumerization blog and to the Enterprise Mobility professionals among us

2013 Will Be Dominated By Mobile, Cloud Developments: IDC
"The IT industry as a whole is moving toward the mobile/social/cloud/Big Data world of the 3rd Platform much more quickly than many realise: from 2013 through 2020, these technologies will drive around 90 percent of all the growth in the IT market," said Frank Gens, Senior Vice President and Chief Analyst at IDC. "Companies that are not putting 80 percent or more of their competitive energy into this new market will be trapped in the legacy portion of the market, growing even slower than global GDP."

European Privacy Watchdogs Examine Microsoft's Services Policies
Microsoft confirmed on Tuesday that it had received a letter from the Article 29 Working Party that it would proceed with a probe. On October 26, the computer giant was notified of a preliminary investigation. The Article 29 Working Party (A29 WP) is made up of the data regulators from all European Union member states as well as the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS).

After first-round success, Microsoft accelerator lines up its new start-ups
“Over 300 companies, consisting of 1,000 entrepreneurs, applied to enter the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure, but we could only accept 13,” said Weisfeld. Based on the results of the first group, which began its four-month participation in the first accelerator group last March, the chosen few have a busy — and enriching — future to look forward to, with the new program running from December through March.

Engine Yard Continues Trend of Local Fabric for Public Clouds
Last month, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider Engine Yard released a “cloud in a box” that developers can use to test their applications locally before publishing to the public cloud. Multiple cloud providers have now embraced this deployment model as a way to accelerate development while making it easier to try a particular cloud before committing to it.

9 Triumphant Open Source Projects of 2012
The platform namely open source has undergone a profound revolution in recent years as this unique software project has staged itself to be so ample and apt mainly because of its support to challenge the characteristics of similar software from other private vendors like Microsoft. And now with the year 2013 around the corner, let’s take a look at some of the most successful open source projects of the year 2012.

Quote for the day:

"Never be afraid to try, remember, amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic." -- Anonymous

December 22, 2012

India developing own OS to boost cybersecurity
India currently is dependent on many imported OSes based on Windows and Linux, which are likely to have malicious worms and security issues, DRDO's Director-General VK Saraswat said at the Navigation and Communication (NAVCOM) conference, The Times of India reported Thursday. Hence, it is essential India builds its own operating system, he said.

6 Steps IT Can Take to Bring Business Into Tablet Decisions
Tablets are the darlings of hypermobile employees and business leaders looking to improve their processes. Because each tablet-enabled business scenario is different, only business people--those meeting with customers, inspecting stores or sitting in decision meetings, for example--know what they really need from their tablets.

Designing for Resilience in n-Tier applications
One of the most common problems that we face as support engineers is performance issues. Usually, the problem is explained to us as the application being “slow”, “hanged”, “crashed”, “stopped”… well, you name it really! Depending on who’s talking to you and the amount of information gathered about the problem, usually our first task is determining what are the correct symptoms, which many times it’s a challenge on its own.

A look back at 2012's IT news in video
Smartphones, tablets, hirings and firings were all part of the tech landscape in 2012. In this year's Tech News Review, Computerworld takes a look at some of the biggest stories of the year.

Investing in technology: Setting IT priorities in an uncertain economy
In this video Q&A, filmed at the 2012 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in Cambridge, Mass., SearchCIO.com Editorial Director Scot Petersen sits down with Richard Soley, CEO at Object Management Group Inc. in Needham, Mass., to discuss investing in technology areas such as cloud computing, big data and mobility.

Amazon Web Services now accommodates big data storage
High Storage, an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) package, is designed to run data intensive analysis jobs, such as seismic analysis, log processing and data warehousing, according to the company. It is built on a parallel file system architecture that allows data to be moved on and off multiple disks at once, speeding throughput times.

8 Must-Read Management Books for the Holidays
These eight books will keep the professional in your life – or your own management career – advancing during holiday downtime. Leadership guru Art Petty recommends you crack the covers of these books to keep your professional development moving forward.

End of an Era as Kodak Sells Patent Portfolio for $525 Million
Specifically Kodak said under the agreements, it will receive approximately $525 million, a portion of which will be paid by 12 intellectual property licensees organized by the consortium of Intellectual Ventures and RPX Corporation. The Los Angeles Times reports that group not only includes Apple and Google, but Microsoft, Research In Motion, Adobe, Samsung and Huawei.

ISACA Issues Guidelines on Managing Cybersecurity, Private Clouds and Data Privacy
Jeff Spivey, CRISC, CPP, international vice president of ISACA and director of Security Risk Management Inc. said, “As more devices utilize IP addresses, increasing the attack surface, cyber criminals will dedicate themselves to increasingly complex attacks in 2013.”

7 Android trends that need to end in 2012
As we get ready to usher in a new year, I thought it'd be a good time to identify some annoying Android trends that deserve to be left behind in 2012. Think of it as my holiday wishlist. The notion of some of these trends disappearing may be a long shot -- but hey, a guy can always dream.

Quote for the day:

"Knowing that you have complete control of your thinking you will recognize the power…" -- Mikhail Strabo

December 21, 2012

Video games to get scrutiny in U.S. gun violence review
Violence in video games and other aspects of pop culture in the U.S. will be among the areas examined as part of an investigation aimed at reducing gun violence in the country. The investigation, headed by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, has been charged with producing proposals no later than the end of January on legislative action the government could take as it seeks to reduce gun violence.

12 Expert Health IT Predictions For 2013
InformationWeek Healthcare recently offered its own take on the subject. Now we've reached out to CIOs, health IT professionals, analysts, bloggers and other HIT heavyweights in a series of email interviews to get their health information technology predictions for 2013. Here's what they predicted

New Analyst Report Rips Agile: Says It's 'Designed To Sell Services,' a 'Developer Rebellion Against Unwanted Tasks'
The report includes data supporting what Voke calls the "Agile Dilemma," described as "the inherent risk and confusion created by the business desire for speed and flexibility misinterpreted as a mandate to participate in the developer-centric movement called Agile, which may not be appropriate for all organizations or projects."

2012 Dev Predictions: Hello DevOps and Cloud, Goodbye Single-Language Programmers
"When you build clouds and use cloud components," he said, "you don't just develop anymore; you develop and maintain. These things become living systems, and developers need to understand the use case a little better. They need to get comfortable with the idea of maintaining applications, rather than just building features and functionality.

What Comes First in Good BPM Design?
Clay Richardson blogs: Lately, I've become obsessed with evaluating the linkage between good process design and good experience design. This obsession was initially sparked by the primary research I did earlier this year around reinventing and redesigning business processes for mobile. The mobile imperative is driving a laser focus for companies to create exceptional user experiences for customers, employees, and partners.

Cisco IP Phones Vulnerable
“Once in, the attacker can use the phone’s microphones to stealthily exfiltrate audio data at any time, regardless of whether a phone call is in progress,” says Ang Cui, one of the Columbia computer scientists who discovered the vulnerability. The hacked phone can then infect other phones on the same network and attack connected computers and devices such as printers, he adds.

Teradata Offers Free Big Data Training
The free courses allow students to study to become either a Teradata Certified Professional (for those seeking IT careers) or Certified Associate (for business-oriented types who want a conceptual understanding of Teradata technology). The online information includes assignments, articles, case studies, PowerPoint presentations, research reports, software and other materials.

SDN Revenues to Hit $3.7 Billion by 2016: IDC

In a Dec. 19 report, IDC analysts said SDN revenues driven by sales to enterprises and cloud service providers will hit $360 million in 2013, and will grow to $3.7 billion by 2016. Those numbers includes sales of everything SDN-related, from the associated network infrastructure and applications to control plane solutions and professional services.

Can we create a Silicon Valley in India?
Over the last 50 years, Stanford faculty, staff and graduates have launched nearly 1,200 companies. More than 50 percent of Silicon Valley’s products come from companies started by Stanford alumni —and that excludes Hewlett-Packard, one of the Valley’s largest firms. Here is a round table discussion with the dean of Stanford on what does India need to do to come up with it's own Silicon Valley?

The 10X Developer in You
These creatures eschew laws of nature, compared to average Joe Programmer they produce more high quality work in less time. But are they really some special superhero? Born with a keyboard in their hands, mind made of linear algebra and visualising complex systems before they can walk? Or just normal people with an opportunity to actually¬†work?

Quotes for the day:

"Every really new idea looks crazy at first." -- Abraham H. Maslow
"It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers." -- James Thurber

December 20, 2012

Drucker and Deming = Lean Marketing
Once this is identified and organized you are well on your way in creating a great marketing system. Now, all you have do is put it into action. Granted a well-defined problem is half the work but how do you enact it and improve upon the process.

A walk through the integrated Cloud
No doubt, Cloud computing brings great benefits such as affordability, scalability and manageability for businesses, especially for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). And that's one truism Mumbai-based Neural Integrated Systems had in mind while choosing ERPNext, a Cloud-based enterprise resource planning solution from WebNotes Technologies for their business.

Game developers need to diversify to survive
The challenge for these game houses is--apart from creating addictive games--developing a successful monetization strategy around these games to increase revenue. "No games company can thrive without these two components," Luong pointed out.

Avnet Story: How to Integrate 100% of B2B Data Sources
Avent is a large distributor of electronic components with a diverse ecosystem of customer and suppliers. Their B2B infrastructure reflects the complexity of their environment but, despite a sophisticated and mature EDI infrastructure, they were still manually re-keying invoices and product updates from hundreds of spreadsheets and .PDFs received from partners.

Chinese e-commerce sector main target of cybercriminals
According to John Ellis, director of enterprise security at Akamai Technologies, e-commerce is the most widely targeted industry in China by cybercriminals within the country. The sector is booming and growing rapidly in China generating a lot of revenue for the country, he noted, in an interview here Thursday.

The Age of Cognitive Computing
The new technologies that IBM provides this time are directly interrelated. They are all linked to the human senses. That’s why the company indicates the next era as the “the age of cognitive computing”. The computer reaches a higher level in the DIKW hierarchy. The computer already moved from the level of data processing to the level of information processing.

Cloud environments to remain low on attacker’s radar in 2013: Verizon
Increasing popularity of Cloud among enterprises may lead those in the security biz to believe that such deployments would become favored targets for hackers and cybercriminals in the days ahead, but that’s hardly the case. Experts predict that despite its rising fame, Cloud-based environments will remain low on attacker’s radar, at least in 2013.

Windows 8 Management, Security and Licensing Changes: What IT Pros Need To Know
Simply put, Windows 8 will bring new ways for IT pros to deal with client management, security and licensing. Those changes largely reflect Microsoft's moves to address a shift toward a more mobile device-centric world that is taking shape. And while much is known about Windows 8 at this point, much also remains shrouded in mystery, even at this late date.

Private cloud computing benefits occur on a case-by-case basis
"Private cloud is hard and expensive, and at the end of the day, you still own the infrastructure and have to manage and integrate it. Yikes!" said Ellen Rubin, vice president of cloud products at Terremark, a Verizon company that offers managed hosting and cloud services.

Web designer sentenced after building torrent website
What happens if you design a website and the client puts it to potentially illegal services? According to one court, you're just as culpable. First reported by TorrentFreak, a website designer who was contracted to work on a now-dead torrent search website, StudentBay, has been found guilty of copyright infringement offences.

Quote for the day:

"Always bear in mind, that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other thing. " -- Abraham Lincoln

December 19, 2012

Shipping software at 20% completion

DeNA first puts out its games on browsers rather than applications, which allows for “tweaking and tuning” in real time, says Mr Moriyasu. A Japanese game may be only 20% completed when it is made available to gamers. Its developers believe this enables them to finesse it, so that it stays popular for longer.

Microsoft plugs Outlook.com, knocks Google after Sync death notice
Last week, Google announced it would phase out synchronization via Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), which companies like Apple and Google license from their Redmond, Wash. rival to push email to smartphones and tablets, and sync calendar entries and contacts on multiple devices.

.NET Framework 4.5 Multi-Threaded Globalization
The .NET Framework 4.5 includes a simplified way of setting the default culture and UI culture for an application domain. In .NET Framework 4 and earlier frameworks, if you wanted to set the Culture and UI Culture for an application, you’d typically set the culture settings on the current Thread.

How to trick Siri into using Google Maps
All you do ask for directions like you normally would, but tack on "via transit." So, for example, to find the nearest Starbucks, you'd say, "Take me to the nearest Starbucks via transit." What happens next is that Siri pulls up a list of any installed "routing apps" -- including Google Maps

Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos
The new intellectual property policy, which takes effect on January 16, comes three months after Facebook completed its acquisition of the popular photo-sharing site. Unless Instagram users delete their accounts before the January deadline, they cannot opt out.
Update: Instagram apologizes to users: We won't sell your photos

The Year Ahead: Disposable Storage Infrastructure
Employees, including upper-level managers, love these devices so much that they won't wait for the enterprise to issue one; they'll bring their own and expect IT to support it (BYOD). These new mobile devices change the relationship between data and devices. The data is virtualized and made available via Web services from giant providers such as Amazon AWS. This is the consumer cloud. Expect a rapid demand for similar corporate data services to support a new breed of mobile applications.

Social Science Pushing Data Frontiers
Addressing the pressing need to recruit suitable university graduates for careers in data science, the Nokia mother-daughter data science team of Amy O’Connor and Danielle Dean made the case at Strata-Hadoop World 2012 for college grads with math/stats, bioengineering and social science educational backgrounds.

Five Qualities of Successful Leaders
In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, Bryant shares what he has learned from Xerox CEO Ursula Burns, Ford CEO Alan R. Mulally, Yum Brands CEO David C. Novak, Teach for America CEO Wendy Kopp, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, and other leaders.

Ovum: SDN architecture is the way to go for future networks
In a new report, researchers at Ovum have revealed that the three-tier hierarchy (access, aggregation, and core) of network architecture is going away in favour of flatter architectures, virtualized application software is replacing network appliances, and network infrastructure is becoming much more programmable.

But, You Are Infected
Before you write your plan to make next year rock, take a few minutes (or longer, if you’re serious about your goals), and decide what you need to unlearn. Over the course of your life, you’ve been infected by some beliefs that you now hold as truths. You’ve learned to take some actions based on those beliefs, and to avoid other actions—some of which would help you to produce much greater results.

How Do We Read Code?
The goal is to figure out some way of measuring what features in programming systems help programmers understand wht they are doing, and how this can be used to make systems that lead to higher quality software. Mike is currently running an experiment where he shows people several short Python programs and asks them to tell the output of the program.

Derivative-free nonlinear optimization for .NET and Java
There are several more or less time-efficient ways of solving (constrained) non-linear optimization problems, including simulated annealing, genetic algorithms and direct search methods such as the Nelder-Mead method (a good overview of mathematical optimization with several links is provided here.)

Quote for the day:

"If you're never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances." -- Julia Sorel

December 18, 2012

Chasing the Network Visibility Problem
IT organizations need a virtual tap that monitors traffic flowing over the virtual switch and forwards the information to a centralized analysis solution that presents end-to-end visibility into the application -- across both the virtual and physical network -- from the same dashboard.

Discovering Hidden Purpose and Meaning in the Work We Do
Many search for years, then eventually give up and settle into enduring work with dogged determination while keeping one eye on retirement. However, a few are lucky enough to discover their unique purpose for work — a purpose that uniquely matches their interests and personalities.

Modern Programming Languages
Each of the languages is seemingly designed to take advantage of various platform affordances or work within their constraints. And, as the history of computing has shown us repeatedly, the advent of innovative hardware often leads to a rethinking of language — especially when it comes to the entrenched options (C, C++, Fortran), which are probably not going away anytime soon but might face serious threats from the latest to crash the language party.

More data-wiping malware found in Iran
Maher Center described the new threat as a targeted attack, but said that it has a simple design and is not similar to other sophisticated targeted attacks previously seen in the region. "Despite its simplicity in design, the malware is efficient and can wipe disk partitions and user profile directories without being recognized by anti-virus software," the center said in its advisory.

Incentive-based pricing models for your next IT outsourcing contract
The strength of the gain sharing pricing approach, Martin said, is that even without a contractual obligation, the provider still has an incentive to identify these kinds of cost-reduction measures because they ultimately benefit the provider in the form of improved margins.

The Role of Analytic Databases in Modern BI Architectures
In the year ahead we will see how vendors (and their customers) will choose to adopt the integration of multiple data stores for BI and how modern BI architectures will evolve over the next several years in companies leveraging Hadoop. Likewise, the ongoing balance of semantics as part of the modern BI architecture – with in-database federation, data virtualization and BI services layers – will continue to be increasingly important for BI development methodologies.

Insurers Need CDOs to Maintain a Modern Enterprise
Converting data to information, and then to actionable analytics and modeling, is the next competitive frontier in the insurance industry. The CDO could drive this conversion by creating an ‘Information Strategic Plan’ that would clearly articulate the ultimate vision for information usage in the organization. He or she would translate that vision into action steps.

SSD prices continue to plunge
Dynamite Data said it has monitored the price, rebate and stock status of more than 600 individual SSDs at hundreds of e-commerce merchants over the past three years. In August, it noted in a blog post that SSDs had finally broken the "magic" $1-per-gigabyte price point, proclaiming it "the new normal."

How much money will top tech firms make from mobility next year?
The study suggests that over 2013, Google will generated approximately $4 billion in mobile advertising revenue. Google's mobile ad revenue is predicted to jump 84 percent in 2013 from a predicted figure of $2.2 billion this year, and reach $6.33 billion in 2014, mainly through the tech firm's search and advert business.

IBM: Computers Will See, Hear, Taste, Smell and Touch in 5 Years
The five senses are really all part of one grand concept: cognitive computing, which involves machines experiencing the world more like a human would. For example, a cognizant computer wouldn't see a painting as merely a set of data points describing color, pigment and brush stroke; rather, it would truly see the object holistically as a painting, and be able to know what that means.

Data Decisions: You Can’t Be Held Responsible (Or Can You?)
In other words, what happens when a strategy goes awry, a product flops or investors lose money? Can data analysts be held accountable? Data mining newsletter KDNuggets asked its readers the question: Should data scientists/data minters be responsible for their predictions? Its results are here.

Quote for the day:

"Vision is a picture of the future that produces passion." -- Bill Hybels

December 17, 2012

10 skills for developers to focus on in 2013
Software development had a few years of relative calm. But now the rollercoaster is back on track and it’s picking up speed, as HTML5 gains a foothold and Windows 8 threatens to significantly change the Windows development landscape. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, you should consider learning at least a few of these 10 software development skills.

Public Cloud Services Will Gain New Momentum in 2013
Over the 2012–2016 forecast reporting period, IDC believes that public IT cloud services will enjoy a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26.4 percent, that's five times the traditional IT industry, as more business leaders accelerate their shift to the cloud services model for IT applications.

Last chapter for e-readers?
Analysts are sounding a proverbial death knell for e-readers, which have declined 36% in 2012 as buyers turned instead to multi-use tablets. Both IHS Suppli and IDC recently issued dire warnings, if not obituaries, for e-readers. IHS said Monday that e-readers will see a 36% drop in shipments to retailers in 2012 over last year, and another 27% contraction in 2013.

Financial Platform Hits 500,000 Transactions Per Second
The platform uses ”in memory” matching atop of GigaSpaces’ XAP solution, running the application in a pure data and compute GigaSpaces grid with no database attached. The tests were conducted with Intel Xeon Processor E7 family, at Intel’s Computing lab in Reading, United Kingdom

Is the cloud the right place for your data warehouse?
Forward-looking businesses that have already embraced Amazon's cloud may move more quickly to the cloud for services like data warehousing, whereas larger enterprises that have been slow to jump into the public cloud may test the service on a use-case basis to see if it's the right fit for them.

SaaS integration costly and challenging
Sabharinath Bala, research manager of enterprise applications at IDC Asia-Pacific, said companies increasingly prefer a hybrid IT environment which combines existing on-premise software withSaaS applications. To facilitate integration, these SaaS vendors would offer a number of connectors or adaptors in their software to traditional applications, he noted.

Four Lessons From the Best Bosses I Ever Had
Guide your people's passion and get out of the way: the autonomy and freedom I was given to create and do my job exponentially increased my passion, excitement and success. ... Many companies treat their employees as employees — nicely and kindly, even generously — but not as humans.

A List of Data Science and Machine Learning Resources
Every now and then Matt get asked for some help or for some pointers on a machine learning/data science topic. He use to respond with links to resources by folks that I consider to be experts in the topic area. Over time his list has gotten a little larger so he decided to put it all together in a blog post. I am sure this will be of use for many of you.

FortiGuard Labs’ 2013 Top Threat Predictions
Fortinet, a high-performance network security player revealed FortiGuard Labs’ 2013 threat predictions, highlighting six threats to watch out for next year.

ReactiveUI 4.2 is Released!
In ReactiveUI 4.2, View Bindings automatically support conversions between types. This feature is analagous to the IValueConverter class in XAML bindings.These converters are registered using Service Location (RxApp.Register), and custom ones can be easily registered as well. In WPF, theTypeConverter framework is used to convert between many common types.

Quote for the day:

"The man who does things makes many mistakes, but he never makes the biggest mistake of all - doing nothing." -- Ben Franklin

December 16, 2012

Problems – An Opportunity for Radical Innovation
Rowan Gibson writes in his blog ... I see this same ‘problem as opportunity’ attitude when I talk to Indian companies of every stripe. When I asked one CEO recently about the impact of the weak Dollar on his business, his reply was stunningly upbeat. “Oh,” he said with a grin, “that really works in our favor. It’s going to make it much easier for us to expand in the U.S. market. Now we can buy up American companies at bargain basement prices”.

Why IBM and Intel Are Chasing the $100B Opportunity in Nanophotonics
The idea behind Nanophotonics (or Silicon Photonics) is actually quite simple: take the world’s fastest communication technology (light), and build it directly into semiconductor chips using well-known and massively scalable production processes.

Effective vs Ineffective Security Governance
Comparing and contrasting a set of behaviors and actions is useful to further illustrate effective versus ineffective security governance. Sometimes the absence of a quality, value, or cultural norm is a more revealing indicator than its presence.

Google Shuts Down Shopping Service for China
"Shopping in China was not providing businesses with the level of impact we had hoped, so we will be sunsetting it in order to focus on the products that do," the company said in a statement. Google will instead devote more resources to its advertising services for apps and search, and connecting Chinese suppliers with overseas customers with tools including its Global Market Finder.

Welcome to the Converged Future of Cloud
Disruption comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes, you can't even see it. Regardless, a cool name doesn't hurt a disruptive force, and can actually enhance its impact. Such is the case with the mCloud Helix, a wild-sounding mechanism that offers a bold promise: private cloud in a box. Granted, the cloud is all about servers, so in-and-of-itself, this offer isn't terribly novel. But when you peek under the covers, coolness does appear.

The Rewards of Ignoring Data
Can you make smarter decisions by ignoring data? It certainly runs counter to our mission, and sounds a little like an Orwellean dystopia. But as we’re going to see, ignoring some of your data some of the time can be a very useful thing to do.

DotNetNuke 7 with Active Directory and SharePoint Lists
DotNetNuke 7 provides support for active directory authentication and includes a SharePoint connector which enables fast and secure publishing of SharePoint documents to websites, intranets and extranets. In an exclusive interview to InfoQ, Richard Dumas, Senior Director of Product Marketing, DotNetNuke Corp shares his views about the features included with the recent release.

Entity Framework 6: Alpha2 Now Available
The Entity Framework team recently announced the 2nd alpha release of EF6. The alpha 2 package is available for download from NuGet. Since this is a pre-release package make sure to select “Include Prereleases” in the NuGet package manager, or execute the following from the package manager console to install it:

So What If You Have Big Data? Without Data-Driven Processes And Products, It’s Useless
You don’t win gold medals just for having data. The real winners are those like Amazon and Netflix that find ways to leverage their data better than the competition. Without a game plan to turn your data into revenue, you may as well scrap your badass Hadoop cluster and the petabytes of data it contains.

How to Become a Morning Person
This is not like trying to become a professional basketball player if you are only 5'6" tall. This is more like trying to change a belief system and a set of habits. You can do it if you are intentional. “Morning people” tend to make more money, be more productive, be healthier and live longer and be more happy and satisfied in their lives.

Quotes for the day:

"Very few of the great leaders ever get through their careers without failing, sometimes dramatically." -- Philip Crosby

"Leadership is a matter of having people look at you and gain confidence in how you react.If you're in control,they're in control" -- Tom Landry

December 15, 2012

Official document reveals the rules of Oracle's cloud
Customers should be mindful of other policies, such as one that allows Oracle to turn off access to accounts in the event of a dispute or account violation. "Customers may want to get clarity on the type of incidents that would result in a temporary turn-off of service," Wang said.

A decision maker's guide to organizational records management strategy
In the past, unless you were being sued or were part of some niche industry, records management strategy was often left on the back burner. ... "A lot of organizations don't do a very good job of it, if they do anything at all," said Jim Just, a partner at Imerge Consulting Inc., about the lack of respect for records management. "They just sort of let it roll along at its own impetus. They need to get control of it, and they are starting to realize it."

Computing and the Law: The America Invents Act
The twelfth in a series of articles in Computer magazine provides basic information on legal issues facing people and businesses that operate in computing-related markets discusses employment law issues faced by new companies.

SMS stealing apps uploaded to Google Play by Carberp banking malware gang
Several malicious Android apps designed to steal mobile transaction authentication numbers (mTANs) sent by banks to their customers over SMS (Short Message Service) were found on Google Play by researchers from antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab.

With JOBS Act, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance likely won't get easier
With the arrival of the JOBS Act, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance requirements are bound to change, or are they? As with many compliance questions, the answer is, “It depends.” In this tip, we'll first take a look at the general provisions of SOX as they apply to IT controls, and then, in that context, discuss the impact of the JOBS Act.

Cybersecurity firm identifies ‘credible threat’ to 30 U.S. banks
The report, scheduled to be released Thursday by McAfee Labs, warns the financial industry to be wary of software that creates fraudulent online banking transactions. Hackers could create fake bank transactions, or skim a portion of high-dollar bank transfers, the report said.

Dell software aims to automate mobile device management
The Dell KACE K3000 Mobile Management Appliance combines the new software with a rack-mounted Dell server. The K3000 appliance handles jobs such as over-the-air provisioning of iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, enforcing through user profiles a range of security and management policies, tracking hardware software inventories and managing distribution of enterprise mobile apps.

Why You Must Develop the Right Talent Channels
At an early stage company, hiring is the CEO’s job. It should not be outsourced, delegated or de-prioritized. The assumption is that the CEO has defined company culture and is hiring within that cultural norm. As Brad Feld wrote, focusing on cultural fit is a must. ... The CEO probably should be spending between 40% and 70% of their time hiring in the early stages.

The role of software-defined networks in cloud computing
Given the elasticity of views about what a software-defined network is, it's hardly surprising that SDN's specific role in the cloud is elusive. There are two software-defined networking models and two different SDN missions in cloud computing. Since networks create the cloud, managing the interplay between these two factors could be the key to cloud efficiency and success.

IT Outsourcing Hits Nine-Year Low In Q3
The U.K.-based research group pegged the total contract value of deals signed worldwide during the period at $18.9 billion, down 33% from the same time a year ago.The analyst blamed the tech services downturn on the weak global economy. Looking to the fourth quarter, "There will need to be a significant upturn in both TCV and deal volume if last year's performance is to be matched," said Thomas.

Quote for the day:

"It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time." -- Winston Churchill

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