Tech Bytes - Daily Digest: March 2013

March 31, 2013

Next hurdle for mobile lifecycle teams: User experience skills
Commercial mobile developers generally understand the importance of getting that experience right. But for most enterprise development teams, it's a whole new ball game. Mobile ALM teams typically lack user experience (UX) skills, said Rege. "It's rare for [enterprise software teams] to have UX experts on staff. Until now, the user experience role didn't exist."

Critical denial-of-service flaw in BIND software puts DNS servers at risk
The flaw stems from the way regular expressions are processed by the libdns library that's part of the BIND software distribution. BIND versions 9.7.x, 9.8.0 up to 9.8.5b1 and 9.9.0 up to 9.9.3b1 for UNIX-like systems are vulnerable, according to a security advisory published Tuesday by the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), a nonprofit corporation that develops and maintains the software. The Windows versions of BIND are not affected

Risk management strategy must be in place before moving data to the cloud
Any migration of company data to the cloud should be preceded by a thorough assessment of the nature of the data, including the relative impact a loss or theft of that data would have on internal operations, business partnerships and client/customer relations, plus the capabilities, security protocols and interdependencies of potential cloud service providers, the experts said last week during a panel discussion at Business Insurance's 2013 Risk Management Summit in New York.

Renesas Hopes to Put Powerful ARM Processor in Cars
The system-on-a-chip will be able to handle four streams of 1080p video, including Blu-Ray support at 60 frames per second, image and voice recognition and high-resolution 3D graphics with almost no CPU load, according to Renesas. The graphics performance is helped by the use of Imagination Technologies' PowerVR Series6 G6400 GPU.

10 portable battery chargers keep your device powered
Who among us hasn’t found ourselves silently cursing smartphone developers when our batteries run out of juice just when we need them most? These small but powerful portable battery chargers can help you out in a pinch; some can even charge your tablet, too. Just throw one of these handy little gadgets in your bag or pocket and you'll never find yourself without a power source when you are on the go. Arranged from largest capacity to lowest, here are 10 mobile battery chargers that can help keep you in power.

Malware-Detecting 'Sandboxing' Technology No Silver Bullet
The security technology called "sandboxing" aims at detecting malware code by subjecting it to run in a computer-based system of one type of another to analyze it for behavior and traits indicative of malware. Sandboxing -- one alternative to traditional signature-based malware defense -- is seen as a way to spot zero-day malware and stealthy attacks in particular. While this technique often effective, it's hardly foolproof, warns a security researcher who helped establish the sandboxing technology used by startup Lastline.

Software Complexity - an IT Risk perspective
Complexity as the above definition goes, requires more resources to be expended than normal and thus is counter productive. We have numerous best practices, standards and frameworks that advocate for eliminating complexity, but somehow it creeps in and pose as a challenge in most cases. The consequence of software complexity as we have put it above clearly is risk, and it could be even be a business risk, when we look at it in the end user perspective.

High Performance Messaging for Web-Based Trading Systems
This presentation by Frank D. Greco, Director of Technology for Kaazing Corporation will investigate WebSocket and how trading systems can be designed to leverage this new web protocol for reliability, security and performance for desktop, mobile, datacenter and cloud environments.

Pentaho Instaview Templates Improves Big Data Access And Analysis
To accelerate the big data analytics cycle, Pentaho Corporation has new templates for its Instaview big data discovery application. These new templates analyses big data in 3 easy steps and enable data analysts and IT professionals to discover, visualize and explore large volumes of diverse data.

Emerging Expectations of a CIO
CIO’s are witnessing significant change. Gone are the days of simply keeping IT running efficiently, reducing costs and mitigating risks. Today’s CIOs must also balance a broader role on the executive team and new responsibilities that directly influence business strategy. Carl Wilson, former Marriott CIO and executive consultant, and Craig Ledo, Director of Product Marketing, FrontRange discusses emerging expectations of a CIO and how to leverage IT to meet business demands

Quote for the day:

"Truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking." --Malcolm Gladwell

March 30, 2013

IT Concerns About Targeted Malware Rising
"The whole thing with targeted malware is that targeted threats are aimed at you," says Goddess. "They are the most difficult to defend against because it's like a virus that only affects you. And the attackers are not stopping. They'll persist until they get in whether it takes months or years. Antivirus isn't going to work because people haven't seen the signatures before."

Building a Web Security Architecture – Deciding on the right form factor
The solution you choose should align to your business objectives. Beyond risk mitigation, you may need to support your business’ expansion; perhaps you are opening up new offices to accommodate your rapid growth or have to quickly absorb new offices coming into your network as the result of mergers and acquisitions. It may be that you are being asked to drive operational efficiencies; perhaps you need to consolidate IT resources, standardize your architecture or support virtualization and cloud initiatives.

Does completing a PCI compliance checklist ensure security?
The PCI DSS is not without value, but, ultimately, it is insufficient on its own to act as a basis for an effective software security program. One notable aspect of the PCI DSS is that it was the first major commercial standard to mandate specific application security measures. This had great potential to help organizations improve the security of the software they were producing and deploying, but, in practice, the PCI compliance checklist is pretty limited in its scope.

Windows Blue under the hood: MinKernel and BaseFS
Villinger found mention of something called "BaseFS" buried in the Windows Blue code. This doesn't seem to be a new name for ReFS, the new file system for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. Instead, according to one of my contacts, BaseFS is more of an internal concept that has to do with shared functionality between the different file systems

Top 10 consumerization definitions IT pros should know
It's important for IT professionals to stay ahead in this rapidly changing technological world. This list counts down our top tech terms related to the consumerization of IT, and explains how they affect IT. The rankings are based on our most popular terms, and the 10 definitions that made the cut say a lot about where IT has come from, where it is now and where it's headed.

Expert Advice on Co-Working Spaces for Small Businesses
Before you start a co-working space, it’s a good idea to build a community of people who would be the potential users. You can do this without even having a physical location. You can host a “jelly” — a regular meet-up of freelancers in a location such as a library or cafe. You can host other meetings in the evenings. This way you’ll get to know how much demand there is for your idea.

'Team mobile' takes shape
Mobile applications emerging today are true enterprise applications, in that they connect to key company databases and legacy systems, Murphy said. "You have to have an understanding of the back end in order to develop the front end that users see on their mobile devices." Early mobile apps didn't require that skill set, added Nathan Clevenger, chief technology officer for iFactr Inc., a St. Paul, Minn.-based firm that sells mobile tools for Microsoft developers.

Disruptive digital cliques
The core of successes in achieving enduring success with modern digital tools to enhance and simplify business performance is fundamentally about people, not the technology. Alarmingly large numbers of people have no clear idea of how they are expected to use powerful technologies at work and the result is typically very inefficient, with information and collaboration silos being spun up to suit cliques.

John Maeda on creative leadership
Innovating something, be it a stand alone product or a massively interconnected system, involves many more days of getting to the peak than it does scaling the peak. This is because there are so many pitfalls along the way -- so it always feels like you're climbing something. ... It can't be helped; if you're innovating, by definition you're venturing out through the dark unknown, so of course you'll stumble and fall and have to pick yourself up.

Capturing Compliance Requirements: A Pattern-Based Approach
We can considerably reduce the errors and omissions generated in expensive manual process inspections by partially or fully automating assurance tasks, thereby lowering compliance assurance’s overall cost. The degree of this automation is contingent on the ability to capture and formalize compliance requirements. Unfortunately, using formal languages to capture compliance requirements is diffi cult for business users who are unskilled or inexperienced with such languages.

Quote for the day:

"If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere." -- Frank Clark

March 29, 2013

Straight talk on security gets employees to listen -- and comply
"Compliance is necessary, but it's not sufficient," says Malcolm Harkins, vice president and chief information security officer at Intel. Harkins' goal is to get employees to go beyond compliance toward full commitment to protecting the company's information. "If they're committed to doing the right thing and protecting the company, and if they're provided with the right information, [then] they'll make reasonable risk decisions."

Build Simple Web UIs with the Nancy Framework
According to the github page, the Nancy framework (NancyFx) provides the "super-duper-happy-path" -- a "lightweight, low-ceremony framework for building HTTP-based services." This is exactly what a Windows service needs for exposing a simple configuration UI. Normally, you'd plug NancyFx into ASP.NET and use it instead of Web Forms or Model-View-Controller (MVC). But NancyFx supports other hosts such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and even supports the concept of "self-hosting."

New Windows 8 hardware specs hint at 7-inch tablets and a Microsoft Reader
The new guidelines relax the minimum resolution for Windows 8 devices to 1024 x 768 at a depth of 32 bits. That’s a significant change from the current guidelines, which require a minimum resolution of 1366 x 768 for a device to be certified with the Windows 8 logo. From the announcement, it appears that the new guidelines are effective immediately, but it’s likely that any new devices that use this form factor will ship along with the forthcoming Windows Blue update.

Microsoft makes good on promise, publishes list of 41K patents
"Transparency around patent ownership will help prevent gamesmanship by companies that seek to lie in wait and 'hold up' companies rather than enable a well-functioning secondary market," said Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, on a blog announcing the searchable list. "[And] transparency is a prerequisite to enforceability of patent licensing pledges. Quite simply, without transparency it is impossible to determine if a company is in fact abiding by those commitments."

Our Security Models Will Never Work — No Matter What We Do

If security won’t work in the end, what is the solution? Resilience — building systems able to survive unexpected and devastating attacks — is the best answer we have right now. We need to recognize that large-scale attacks will happen, that society can survive more than we give it credit for, and that we can design systems to survive these sorts of attacks. Calling terrorism an existential threat is ridiculous in a country where more people die each month in car crashes than died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

8 Reasons Enterprise Architecture Programs Fail
Enterprise architecture was conceived some 25 years ago to address the increasing complexity of IT systems and their poor alignment with business goals. The same problems still exist today, amplified by the accelerating pace of technology change. Why is it that EA programs are more likely to fail than succeed? Here are eight typical failure modes, followed by recommendations on how to avoid them.

Failing. And dealing with it.
You will fail. That's the reality of trying to bring new things to life. You will fail, and may fail over and over and over. You may never succeed, actually. But, some folks are able to take that failure and get to the mantra of Principle 14, which is Failure Sucks, But Instructs. The wonderful article titled "Following Your Bliss, Right Off the Cliff" published on New York Times examines the failures and recoveries of several entrepreneurs

10 Geeky Ways to Celebrate April Fools' Day
April Fools' Day has become increasingly geeky, since the Web, cameras and other high-tech tools make it so much easier to prank people. Here's a roundup of ways to make the most of your April 1.

Don’t Plan for Perfection
we simply let the future unfold without forecasting. On the contrary, as a good manager, you must understand your costs, your revenue model and how you make money. And you’re on the hook for growing and strengthening over time. However, instead of relying on what is most often an unnatural level of precision around an unpredictable set of numbers, build the systems and processes to incorporate learning, constantly refresh forecasts and push the planning

What does a CTO do?
Amr Awadallah summarizes his findings by answering four core questions: (1) what is the CTO Mission? (2) how to measure the CTO? (3) How should the CTO split his/her time internally vs externally? then finally (4) what are the specific responsibilities of the CTO towards the main constituents inside the organization? Note that this role description is focused on pure CTOs, as opposed to CTOs whom still own the operational aspects of the engineering organization, it is also biased towards enterprise CTOs vs other domains.

Quote for the day:

"We all need lots of powerful long-range goals to help us past the short-term obstacles." -- Jim Rohn

March 28, 2013

BYOD is not for everybody, and especially not for executives
As computing devices get more personal and pervasive, people are going to be more confident and competent in their personal use of technology whether they’re on a desktop computer or a mobile device. But if you’re a CEO, director, manager, or your employment status makes you eligible for litigation, then bringing your own device to work can be detrimental to your personal and professional life.

A Serious Question for Serious Practitioners
The question Daryl Conner about to ask is aimed at seasoned practitioners who are at least proficient (preferably highly skilled) in practicing their craft and who relate to this work as an aspect of their life’s mission. Anyone reading this blog is invited to consider the question but that’s who it’s aimed at. Here is the question: Is there something beyond the obvious you are hoping to achieve through your work?

Update: Spamhaus hit by biggest-ever DDoS attacks
Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare, a San Francisco-based firm that has been helping Spamhaus over the past few days, today said that the attacks have been going on since March 19 and have generated up to 300Gbps of DDoS traffic. That's about three times bigger than the biggest DDoS attacks seen so far and several magnitudes greater than the 4Gbps to 10Gbps of traffic generated by typical DDoS attacks.

5 Leadership Lessons: Avoiding the "Mediocre Me" Mindset
Mediocre Me by Brigadier General John Michel is a challenge to think differently about your role in the world. “Instead of the term leader being synonymous with someone who strives to use their influence to build value into their surroundings,” writes Michel, “it is more likely we associate it with someone doing whatever it takes just to keep the routine going.” Here are five more thoughts from Brigadier General John Michel:

iPhones most 'vulnerable' among smartphones
According to SourceFire's "25 Years of Vulnerabilities" study released in early March, which analyzed vulnerabilities from the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) data and National Vulnerability Database (NVD), the majority of mobile phone vulnerabilities have been found in Apple's iPhone. The database provides 25 years of information on vulnerabilities to assess, spanning from 1988.

On Kickstarter: The $99 Android-Powered MiiPC May Be Your Child's Next Computer
It launches this summer with Jellybean 4.2, a 1.2GHz Dual Core processor, 1GB of memory, and 4GB of internal flash storage. The box also packs in 2 USB ports, a speaker and microphone jack, Wifi, Ethernet, Bluetooth, and HDMI out. The developers have made tweaks to both the UI and base Android OS, optimizing it for large-screen displays of up to 1920×1080 resolution and baking in support for unlimited user accounts.

Coursera - Machine Learning
This course provides a broad introduction to machine learning, datamining, and statistical pattern recognition. Topics include: (i) Supervised learning (parametric/non-parametric algorithms, support vector machines, kernels, neural networks). (ii) Unsupervised learning (clustering, dimensionality reduction, recommender systems, deep learning). (iii) Best practices in machine learning (bias/variance theory; innovation process in machine learning and AI).

Global IT Spend Will Rise 4.1% To $3.8T In 2013, With Mobile And Enterprise Leading The Way
Gartner has just released its annual projections on worldwide IT spend over the next two years — arguably the analyst house’s most wide-ranging report covering sales in hardware, software, enterprise and telecoms. The overall trends continue to point up: globally we will see $3.8 trillion spent across all categories, a rise of 4.1% on 2012. That’s a sign of some recovery on a year ago: growth in 2012 was only 2.1%. Mobile and enterprise services are fuelling a lot of the good news, and Gartner further notes that the same trends will largely continue into 2014.

Windows Blue: Why IE 11 is taking a leaf from BlackBerry's book
The version of IE 11 in the leaked build of Windows Blue doesn't do quite that, which is a good thing: browsers trying to interpret prefixes marked for other browsers is not the way to get well-built web pages that take advantage of standards. What is seems to do (remember, this is an unofficial leaked build), is to use a brand new user agent string: IE instead of MSIE. Developers can still target IE specifically, but IE 11 won't be hampered by being sent to versions of pages designed for old builds of IE with bugs long since fixed.

Digital skills a key to the C-Suite: The rise of the Chief Digital Officer
Enter the chief digital officer (CDO). While the CIO labours to keep leading companies abreast of cumbersome, enterprise-wide technology upgrades and efficiencies – virtual servers, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and IT infrastructure of all kinds – and working behind the scenes, the CDO's remit is customer-focused (front end) technologies, investigating the social web, online marketing, data analytics and the impact of the digital revolution on the essence of a company's business strategy.

Quote for the day:

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." -- Abraham Lincoln

March 27, 2013

Microsoft confirms it's shut off Windows 8-Google Apps calendar sync
"This rift impacts both consumers and businesses negatively and needs to be addressed immediately. Impacted users won't change calendar services [just] to work with Windows 8, so it's up to Microsoft to do the right thing and implement CalDAV. [But] Google deserves ridicule for stopping EAS support, too."

Google Compute Engine: interview with NuoDB
Meet engineers from NuoDB: an elastically scalable SQL database built for the cloud. We will learn about their approach to distributed SQL databases and get a live demo. We'll cover the steps they took to get NuoDB running on Google Compute Engine, talk about how they evaluate infrastructure (both physical hardware and cloud), and reveal the results of their evaluation of Compute Engine performance.

The CIO: Facilitator of engaging employee experiences
IT leaders will never be able to expand the conversation about how technology can enable employees or redefine the relationship between IT and employees if the focus is on provisioning and managing technology. The conversations CIOs should be driving is how to design technology experiences which align technology with specific work tasks to drive actions that help employees achieve the outcomes they, and the business, desire.

Data management strategies: Toigo's 5 quick tips for clearing clutter
In this expert video presentation featuring Data Management Institute chairman and Storage Decisions speaker Jon Toigo, storage pros in need of new data management strategies in 2013 can learn five quick and simple ways to get started. View this video or read some of Toigo's comments below to find out how to implement good data hygiene policies without having to make it a year-long initiative.

Softphones provide better communication flexibility for BYOD era
"To be able to have one phone number regardless of the device or where they are physically located is a huge benefit," Myers said. "What company doesn't want their employees reachable or working 24 hours per day?" While organizations will likely never move to a single device that does both computing and telephony, it's not out of the realm of possibilities that a tablet and Bluetooth phone dongle could one day become the only equipment an IT department supplies to employees.

By Paying Employees To Live Near The Office, Imo Cuts Commutes, Ups Happiness
The principal benefits of living near where you work are almost too obvious to mention; the time that would have spent commuting simply goes back to things you love: family, friends, hobbies, sleep. But Imo has found there are secondary benefits, too. A five-mile radius (plus Palo Alto’s climate) makes active commutes, via bike or foot, more likely. Employees find they’re able to pop home during their lunch break to take care of a few quick chores.

Three Steps To Enterprise Cloud Migration
The first stage is co-location or rack hosting, a model in which hardware moves to an offsite data centre. ... The next stage would be managed services, with the hardware continuing to be owned but the services delivered by a third party. ... The final stage is the move to the cloud, a move, Mr Kalla says, that requires a mature and long-term outlook. “It’s a totally hand’s-off environment which might not please technical staff who typically like control".

The problem with the iPad
Everything about the device was built around making it as easy to use as possible. But it's possible to take simplicity too far, especially when enterprise users are concerned, and there's one aspect of the iPad that Apple may need to address to keep enterprise users happy, and that's file system access. Jean-Louis Gassée of The Guardian succinctly summed up the problem facing the iPad.

Performance tradeoffs of TCP Selective Acknowledgment
Selective acknowledgment (SACK) is an optional feature of TCP that is necessary to effectively use all of the available bandwidth of some networks. While SACK is good for throughput, processing this type of acknowledgment has proven to be CPU intensive for the TCP sender. This weakness can be exploited by a malicious peer even under commodity network conditions. This article presents experimental measurements that characterize the extent of the problem within the Linux® TCP stack. SACK is enabled by default on most distributions.

Outdated Java weak spots are widespread, Websense says
A new Websense report suggests that approximately 94 percent of endpoints that run Oracle's Java are vulnerable to at least one exploit, and we are ignoring updates at our own peril. According to security researchers at Websense, it's not just zero-day attacks that remain a persistent threat. Instead, Java exploits are now a popular tool for cybercriminals.

Quote for the day:

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see" -- Arthur Schopenhauer

March 26, 2013

Microsoft services agreement changes: What other enterprises can learn
Google got into trouble with recent changes to its policies regarding the handling of user information, and now Microsoft seems to have caused some concern with similar changes. Should enterprises be concerned with Microsoft's new user information policies? Are there any lessons to be learned for enterprises on how to state exactly what data they collect?

Mobile's browser usage share jumps 26% in three months
Gains on the part of mobile have come at the expense of what Net Applications defines as "desktop," a category that includes both desktop and notebook PCs, primary powered by Microsoft's Windows, and Macs running Apple's OS X. Desktop browser usage dropped 3.1 percentage points in the last three months, and fell 6.3 points in the last 12.

Resolving Cobb's Paradox?

“We know why projects fail; we know how to prevent their failure – so why do they still fail?” Speaking at a recent UK conference, the UK Government’s adviser on efficiency Sir Peter Gershon laid down a challenge to the project management profession: “Projects and programmes should be delivered within cost, on time, delivering the anticipated benefits.”

Some practices to write better C#/.NET code
Write code for People First, Computers Second. Readable code doesn't take any longer to write than confusing code does, at least not in the long run. It’s easier to be sure your code works, if you can easily read what you wrote. That should be a sufficient reason to write readable code. But code is also read during reviews. Code is read when you or someone else fixes an error. Code is read when the code is modified.

Bruce Schneier on data privacy and Google's feudal model of security
In this video interview, Schneier, chief technology security officer with BT Counterpane, discusses the ways in which trust -- and, in turn, data privacy -- is threatened on the Internet, and explains how Google, Apple and others have adopted a feudal model of security, in which their customers have little, if any, recourse to ever reclaim data that rightfully belongs to them.

Dell and Object Management Group to launch an SDN standards body
Dell says at least 31 companies, including networking vendors, enterprises and service providers, are interested in working with the OMG on broad architectural SDN standards, particularly around programmatic interfaces, otherwise known as northbound APIs. ... No one has confirmed which consortium is handcuffing companies, but many predict that it's the Daylight project, which reportedly involves IBM, HP, Cisco, Citrix, Big Switch Networks and NEC. HP and IBM are already members of OMG.

Lawmakers introduce bill on warrantless GPS tracking
The legislation was introduced a day after the government argued before a federal appeals court that warrantless GPS tracking is an important part of the law enforcement process. The government's attorneys have argued that GPS devices can be used to "gather information to establish probable cause, which is often the most productive use of such devices." Requiring a warrant means being forced to establish probable cause before that and ultimately limit the value of GPS devices.

How Would You Build Up a City from Components?
To easily reuse components they should be designed with a loose coupling approach. To make this possible, different frameworks typically implement their event models based on the Observer pattern. This allows multiple recipients to subscribe to the same event. The Observer pattern was originally implemented in Smalltalk. Smalltalk is a user interface framework based on MVC and is now a key part of MVC frameworks.

Data Governance at Starbucks
As Starbucks takes in its own continuous streams of purchase data, and attempts to integrate new data sets from recently-acquired tea seller Teavana, data governance is a concern, he said, noting recent hacking occurrences of government data. Data governance is also about ensuring information is uniform enough to be integrated readily, and that remains a challenge.

5 q's to formulate your strategy for a business
Roger L Martin, dean, Rotman School of Business, has co-authored a book, ‘Playing to Win-How Strategy Really Works', with AG Lafley, the legendary CEO of P&G. Roger demystified the holy grail of strategy down to making the right choices. He said, "Strategy is essentially about making a finite number of choices." To win, a company must choose to do some things and not do the others. Choosing to do everything is to spread your resources thin and diffuse management focus which is a sure-shot recipe for disaster.

Quote for the day:

"It's better to hang out with people better than you. Pick people whose behavior is better than yours and you'll drift in that direction." -- Cameron

March 25, 2013

Amazon Web Services ramps up mobile development
Developers typically access AWS from their PCs but smartphones and tablets are quickly supplanting laptops and PCs as devices of choice for more workers so it would make sense for AWS to turn more attention to those form factors. And, the company added Android and iOS(s appl) support to the AWS management console so users can keep an eye on their services from their device of choice.

Top China uni linked to army's cyberspying unit
According to a report Sunday, Reuters found at least three papers--easily accessible online--on computer network security and intrusion detection, co-authored by faculty members of Shanghai Jiaotong University and the PLA Unit 61398. The army unit was identified as an operational unit actively engaged in cyberespionage by U.S.-based security firm Mandiant last month.

Forcing us to educate users on cybersecurity won't work: Telstra
Telstra's director of corporate security and investigation and internet trust and safety, Darren Kane said that users currently have enough information about online risks, but that it sees the current education issue as one similar to "taking a horse to water". "Making it mandatory for us to provide the information would not solve the problem. I think we do that anyway, because we want to ensure they have a greater online experience and keep coming back for more," Kane said, but also clarified that advising users was part of its commercial interests.

Data Maturity in a Social Business and Big Data World
It is critical then, to have both a strong data governance foundation in place, as well as an infrastructure that can quickly consume, integrate, analyze, and distribute this new information. Incompatible standards and formats of data in different sources can prevent the integration of data and the more sophisticated analytics that create value.

10 of the biggest IT sand traps
Unhelpful users are trickier to work with because they frequently come in the guise of “helpful” individuals who cross a threshold when they become too helpful. They offer reams of tweak suggestions for apps and never want to accept an app as being complete for a given release. Enhancement creep of this nature introduces risk into IT project deadlines. The best way to deal with it is to establish firm cutoffs for app development and enhancement cycles that everyone agrees to.

Where to Find Risks
These risk taxonomies are appropriate for finding product and service delivery risks, but not optimized for finding project delivery risks. For that, PMI’s Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3) is a better source for identifying risks, though it’s cumbersome. Basically, areas where the organization is not mature for project management are opportunities for risk.

Learning from mistakes is overrated
There is a cultural fascination with failure being the source of great lessons to be learned. What did you learn? You learned what didn't work. Now you won’t make the same mistake twice, but you’re just as likely to make a different mistake next time. With that approach you could know what won’t work, but you not gaining any information about what will work.

New storage technologies to deal with the data deluge
With existing hard drive technologies ending their decade-long run of ever-increasing densities, IT shops are waiting for new technologies such as shingled magnetic recording (SMR) and phase-change memory (PCM) to boost storage densities. In the meantime, they are holding down costs -- and boosting data access -- with software that virtualizes, deduplicates and caches data on commodity disk drives, solid-state drives (SSD) and server-side flash memory.

Nokia throws spanner into Google's plans for VP8 codec standard
Mueller notes that Nokia's refusal to license its patents for free or FRAND could make implementing VP8 may be more costly than H.264. Nokia says it took the "unusual step" of withholding licences because VP8 was not an industry-wide effort, but an attempt by one company to force through proprietary technology in a standard.

Efficient code is good but clean code is better

As computing resources continue to grow, efficiency falls further behind another concern when writing code, though. That concern is the cleanness of the code itself. Mostly, this boils down to readability and comprehensibility. Programmers need to be able to read and comprehend your code — programmers that will come along after you have moved on and even when you come back to your own code in six months.

Quote for the day:

"Genius is nothing but a great aptitude for patience." -- Georges Louis Leclerc
"When opportunity comes, it's too late to prepare." -- John Wooden

March 24, 2013

Is IT an Agent of Mass Extinction?
The Maya had a curious habit of not rebuilding their pyramids, but making them bigger and better by building new layers on top of existing pyramids. This is not exactly analogous to what IT has done over various technical generations; IT has not simply added layers of new stuff on top of existing stuff, but has fused the whole lot together into one giant incredibly complex architecture. Loose coupling is a fine architectural principle, but invariably honored in the breach where it really matters.

Big Data Analytics Can Help Banks Stop Cyber Criminals Accessing Secret Data
"It's a bit like 'casing the joint'. If you are a cyber criminal you have to case the joint looking at all the little bits of information that companies expose, trying to find user names or passwords, or the technology that they run so that you can design an attack that will succeed from the outside. So the whole model [of bank security] has gone inside-out."

Adobe and Apple: Allies and rivals through the ages
Apple and Adobe have a long history of both agreement and opposition. They've been closely linked since the early days of desktop publishing, often with complementary product lines and common customers, but they've also often wrestled for the upper hand in their relationship. Among the clearest contrasts in the shifting balance between the two companies are two similar moments nearly a decade apart.

Teleworking requires good information sharing
Taken to its logical conclusion, opposition to teleworking implies that global operating models also don’t work given that the objection to collaborating electronically must apply equally to employees who are in different offices as it does to those who are working from home. ... Whether it is a single employee working remotely or a team operating virtually over the globe, there are five principles that are needed to make them successful. At their core they are about establishing a free flow of information.

Stop Wasting Your Time Solving Problems
Problems shake the confidence of new leaders/managers and make them forget they have what it takes. Instilling confidence in them is more important than solving problems for them. Don’t solve people’s problems give them confidence they can solve them.

Apple buys WiFiSlam, maker of tech for locating phones indoors
Digits notes that Google currently offers indoor mapping in airports, shopping centers, sports stadiums, and other locations. It's not known if WiFiSlam's technology will somehow be incorporated into Apple's Maps app. Apple, of course, tossed Google Maps as the default mapping service in iOS and launched its own mapping app, which, on its debut last September, was lambasted for its shortcomings.

Samsung Looks At Enterprise Users With Galaxy S4 Launch
Samsung Knox is quite similar to BackBerry's Balance system. It allows users to create an encrypted container that stores all the sensitive work related apps and information including e-mail, contacts and documents. All this data is kept separate from the user's personal apps and settings. According to Samsung, this allows secured data to remain intact even if the phone experiences a malware attack.

Queues – the true enemy of flow
In short, queues have a direct economic impact on the business. They increase inventory, stall valuable projects, which increases the risk of loss, delay feedback and impact on motivation and quality. Yet in spite of this, they are rarely tracked or targeted. A company that carefully keeps account of every hour of overtime is quite likely to be blissfully unaware of the cost of delay to a project caused by long queues.

Cloud Service Brokerage is the new Enterprise Architecture
No longer will architects perform such low level solution designs involving ‘nuts and bolts’ components, but they will leverage a portfolio of services available via the broker; and the IT engineer or system integrator is no better off as they will no longer rack and stack, but will merely configure the Cloud services available through enterprise connected models which can be provided by the CSB.

William Schiemann on Reinventing Talent Management
In this AMA podcast, Dr. William Schiemann’s talks about his book Reinventing Talent Management: How to Maximize Performance in the New Marketplace aims to put a tight process and discipline of measurement behind the annual report cliché that “Our people are our most important asset.” At the heart of Dr. Schiemann’s thesis is a provocative new talent management model he terms People Equity.

Quotes for the day:

"Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty." -- Thomas Jefferson

"Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy." -- Norman Schwarzkopf

March 23, 2013

Gartner Recommendations for BlackBerry 10
As BlackBerry’s BlackBerry 10 device becomes available in the U.S. this week, Gartner Inc. analysts say enterprises must determine user demand, address BYOD support, forecast the health of the BlackBerry business and decide whether to upgrade the BlackBerry Enterprise Service.

Why the Best CEOs Listen More
Listening is an essential, yet often overlooked aspect of business communication. Entrepreneurs and senior executives are naturally filled with ideas, and it’s our nature to want to share those ideas with others. But great leaders over time learn to talk less and listen more. There are many benefits of listening. Here are four benefits that executives gain by listening

How Digital Behavior Differs Among Millennials, Gen Xers and Boomers
Millennials have the highest social networking penetration of any generation, and the highest Facebook and Twitter use rates to match. Though Twitter started out with a somewhat older audience, millennials now make up more than half of all US users, and will hover around that point for the next several years. They also account for about four in 10 digital video viewers.

Podcast: Hadoop vendors progress toward enterprise-ready solutions

In this SearchStorage.com podcast, associate site editor Ian Crowley speaks with Evaluator Group senior partner John Webster about the progress Hadoop vendors are making toward offering viable enterprise products for managing and processing "big data." Listen to the podcast or read the transcription below to find out more about the state of Hadoop architecture

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Dell Attracting More Buyout Interest
Blackstone’s interest in Dell, the world’s third-largest PC maker, is considered more serious than that of HP or Lenovo, said one of the people familiar with the situation. As of last night, no one had submitted a proposal or letter to the board for consideration, said another person with knowledge of the situation. The board would have to receive something by March 22 and then determine whether the interest would reasonably lead to a higher offer, this person said.

VMware introduces new Unity Touch clients for mobile Windows
In a post on the VMware End-User Computing blog, Pat Lee, director of product management for end-user computing, introduced Unity Touch clients for VMware Horizon View 2.0. The Unity Touch clients will let users of iOS and Android devices browse and search files, open Windows applications and files. It requires VMware Horizon View 5.2 desktop, she wrote.

Big Data Analytics As A Service, With An Ontology For Cross-Platform Analysis At Its Core
“There is a lot of opportunity for partners to develop and extend the ontology into niche areas that set up for the analysis and types of transactions where we don’t have expertise,” Manish Singh says. Rapid deployment of new ontologies by partners is possible, he says, because they can layer on top of what’s already there vs. building from scratch each time. “Our concept of rapidly deployed ontologies is the ability to have an ecosystem of partners,” he says.

Bretford Releases Enterprise Guide for iOS Deployments
A vendor of iOS charging/synching products has released an interactive e-book that offers businesses an approach to configuring and managing iPads, iPhones and iPods. "iOS Deployment: A Guide to Managing iPad, iPhone and iPod touch in Your Organization" is available a free download from Apple's iBookstore. The digital guide was created with iBooks Author, and designed so that it accept updates as the iOS product line changes in the future, according to the vendor, Bretford Manufacturing.

Innovation: Five Keys to Educating the Next Generation of Leaders
What do educators need to provide for the next generation of positive, innovative leaders? If core competencies are assumed (engineers need to engineer, accountants need to account, writers need to write and so on) what will be the key elements of an education that might help students become life-long learners, successful in multiple, varied career paths? Here are five critical elements that every student should be looking for in an educational journey . . . and educators should be looking to deliver.

DHS shifting to cloud, agile development to boost homeland security
At a hearing before the House Committee on Homeland Security on Tuesday, a DHS IT official gave lawmakers an overview of agile development methodologies, one of the tools that the department is using to fix its IT project management. Agile came up after U.S. Rep Ron Barber (D-Ariz.), a former staffer in Rep. Gabrielle Gifford's office who won that seat after Giffords resigned, asked what DHS was doing to ensure that its IT systems met user needs.

Quotes for the day:

"If you are afraid of failure you don't deserve to be successful!" -- Charles Barkley
"The consumer is the most important part of the production line." — W. Edwards Deming

March 22, 2013

Jack Gold: Has BYOD peaked?

BYOD isn't going to die. But companies are starting to realize that a laissez-faire approach is not sustainable and that more controls and a better strategy are needed. Today, only 21% of companies in our Enterprise Mobility Study have a mobile strategy in place, leaving the rest with a hodgepodge of procedures that are often costly and inconsistent.

Hong Kong planning underground data centers
While the theory is sound, the environmental impact of construction could be high, as water tables would need to be lowered and toxic material removed, she noted. Engineering consultancy firm Arup released an initial feasibility report last year which stated underground facilities in Hong Kong will benefit datacenter owners by increasing security, as it reduced the risk of accidental impact, blast and acts of terrorism.

Retro Database dBASE Making a Comeback?
The decline started with "the disastrous introduction of dBase IV, whose stability was so poor many users were forced to try other solutions. This was coincident with an industry-wide switch to SQL in the client-server market, and the rapid introduction of Microsoft Windows in the business market." Anyway, the new version includes ADO support, a new UI and "enhanced developer features with support for callbacks and the ability to perform high precision math."

Leadership: Disappointed To The Core
"Disappointment is like taking a long lonely walk down a long corridor, and the door at the very end is bolted." -- Those of us, who have experienced disappointment need to be reminded that in this corridor we have doors to the left and to the right. These are the doors made for our choosing.

Breakthroughs in strategy
The cliff-jumping metaphor is a great one and it makes my response obvious: Because it's more fun and there are relatively few consequences. I am only being a little glib. Having spent 20+ years in strategy execution as an internal and external consultant in several dozen organizations, I have come to believe that there are systemic issues, as in “built into the systems and culture of the organization.”

"Tiny Lab" Implanted Under Skin Transmits Blood Marker Levels
Scientists in Switzerland have developed a "tiny lab" on a chip that when implanted just under the skin can track levels of up to five substances in the blood and transmit the results wirelessly to a smartphone or other receiving device in a "telemedicine" network. They suggest the device could be ready for market in four years and has many potential uses, such as helping doctors monitor patients undergoing chemotherapy.

6 Things We Learned about Enterprise Analytics from Nate Silver
To a packed keynote audience at Gartner’s BI event in Grapevine, Texas, celebrated political prognosticator Nate Silver put his wide analytic expertise on display. Along with touching on the way Bayes and data models can – and can’t – impact natural disaster forecasts and chess mastery, Silver dropped plenty of tidbits about the practical strategy and application of analytics. Here are half-dozen quotes and comments that Silver made during his Gartner keynote that are relevant to the enterprise analytics space.

Industry Watch: Information Governance
“However, simply having a policy in place does not ensure that good information governance occurs,” Miles wrote in the report. “Half of those with a policy admit that it is largely unreferenced and unaudited.” ... Aside from the sometimes difficult work of implementing governance policies, AIIM cited other continuing obstacles, such as the range of privacy laws and legal mechanisms in different countries, and the often missing step of training. Only 16 percent regularly train all staff on governance expectations, and almost double that amount have no stated training at all.

IBM moves toward post-silicon transistor
"The scaling of conventional-based transistors is nearing an end after a fantastic run of 50 years," said Stuart Parkin, an IBM fellow at IBM Research who leads the research. "We need to consider alternative devices and materials that will have to operate entirely differently. There aren't many avenues to follow beyond silicon. One of them is correlated electronic systems."

TeamViewer-based cyberespionage operation targets activists, researchers say
The malware is designed to download and execute other modules from the C2 servers as instructed by the attackers. The additional modules can perform various tasks including recoding keystrokes in various processes and taking screen shots, gathering information about the system and local accounts, grabbing the history of attached devices from iTunes and scanning the local hard disk and remote network shares for specific file types.

Quote for the day:

"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our mind." -- Bob Marley

March 21, 2013

The Perfect (Data) Storm: Moving from Automation to Leverage
We are now reaching the limits of automation-based benefits and will increasingly look to data leverage as the new source of these benefits. Data, of course, plays a huge role in both of these concepts and advantageous data management correspondingly becomes a necessary but insufficient precondition to success. Information architecture patterns such as Master Data Management (MDM) provide "how’s" that correspond to business objective "wants".

The CIO role in cybersecurity: Advice from a former White House CIO
As cybercriminals take on bigger, more high-profile targets, businesses are beginning to pay much closer attention to issues of security. They are and will be looking to the CIO and IT for answers. How can CIOs best prepare for these boardroom conversations? Former White House CIO Theresa Payton, now CEO at Fortalice LLC, a cybersecurity solutions company based in Charlotte, N.C., sat down with SearchCIO.com to share some advice. First up: Stop doing what you're doing.

DoD security panel calls for new cyber-defense, offense
The task force recommended that the Department of Defense (DoD) take the lead by building "an effective response" to cyberattacks that would harden public and private IT systems from attack. It called for development of a "ladder of capabilities" to defend against known vulnerabilities -- up to and including a nuclear option -- as part of an American response.

Characters Wanted: Fostering Varied Project Management Teams
Newsflash: there is no known cure for the human personality. Thankfully. we are complicated, confounding and wonderfully different people. The team or project leader’s responsibility is not to find a way to squash the variance in personalities, but rather to foster the right environment for people who are different, to come together and perform. Here are a few key mistakes to avoid as you seek to align your collection of challenging personalities around your project and pursue great performance.

Enterprise software and the curse of vendor sameness
A revolving door of personnel across the major vendors makes this copying almost unavoidable: executives often leave one vendor for another, sometimes even returning to the original company. All of which creates homogeneity in marketing messages, product positioning, and use of language across the enterprise software industry.

FAQ: Inside Microsoft's cloud ERP strategy
"Our target is to be the best provider at volume, at scale," he said. Some hosting partners have specialized offerings, such as for local legal requirements, a higher service-level agreement, or extensive hands-on support; Microsoft won't try to supplant them with Azure, he said. "That's where the partner hosts have a long-term model." "We have some partners that host today, but there's nothing really special about it," Ehrenberg added. "We expect most of them to transition [to Azure]."

A Quick Guide for Building KPI Dashboards: Part 2
The second part of this quick guide to dashboard construction will focus on the meat of dashboard creation: filling it with meaningful information that will make your data much easier to understand and spot trends from. Like the previous part, this guide will divide the process of filling your dashboard with meaningful information into three more easy steps, so that you can get on with creating your own brilliant KPI dashboards in no time!

Computer Networks in South Korea Are Paralyzed in Cyberattacks
The Korea Communications Commission said Thursday that the disruption originated at an Internet provider address in China but that it was still not known who was responsible. Many analysts in Seoul suspect that North Korean hackers honed their skills in China and were operating there. At a hacking conference here last year, Michael Sutton, the head of threat research at Zscaler, a security company, said a handful of hackers from China “were clearly very skilled, knowledgeable and were in touch with their counterparts and familiar with the scene in North Korea.”

DBTool for Oracle - Part 1
DBTool allows you to browse the contents of an Oracle database, but it's certainly not a replacement for PL/SQL Developer and other similar packages. You can also execute queries against the database. The primary purpose of DBTool is to generate code for a multi layered data access framework. DBTool is in itself an example of how to use the generated code, since it is implemented using Reader classes generated from various views in the SYS schema.

Cisco Inadvertently Weakens Password Encryption in its IOS Operating System

The new encryption algorithm is called Type 4 and was supposed to increase the resiliency of encrypted passwords against brute-force attacks. "The Type 4 algorithm was designed to be a stronger alternative to the existing Type 5 and Type 7 algorithms," Cisco said Monday in a security response document published on its website.

Quote for the day:

"The hard part is implementing the decision, not making it." -- Guy Kawasaki

March 20, 2013

Use a tiered storage model to achieve capacity utilization efficiency
Storage expert Jon Toigo discusses the challenges associated with implementing a tiered storage model, and how it can help manage storage capacity demand and lead to a more efficient data center. Storage tiering is not a new idea. It refers to configuring data storage infrastructure as a set of "tiers," where each tier comprises a collection of media (memory, disk or tape) having distinctive performance, capacity and cost characteristics.

Microsoft extends Azure Hadoop, mobile app development functionality

To simplify the roll out of big data applications, Microsoft is offering a public preview of the new HDInsight service for Windows Azure, according to Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president in Microsoft's Server and Tools Business. HDInsight lets users deploy, manage and use Hadoop clusters running on Windows Azure, he said in a blog post.

Tips for making use of the Google Web Toolkit
The goal of GWT is to enable productive development of high-performance web applications without the developer having to be an expert in browser quirks, XMLHttpRequest, and JavaScript. The overview and description will cover the built-in tools found within the kit, and will highlight the Plugin for Eclipse, Speed Tracker, GWT Designer, and GWT SDK.

Templating in Javascript
The most common way of defining a template is to use a script tag. By giving it a type of “text/template” (some engines use different types, but it shouldn’t make too much of a difference), you tell the browser that it shouldn’t consider the contents of the script tag as javascript, so it won’t try to run it and go boom. In fact, it will quietly ignore the element, allowing you to define your template inside

BIDS Templates Come to Visual Studio 2012 in SSDT Update
SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) encompasses a bunch of integrated services and enhancements to improve database development entirely from within the Visual Studio IDE, such as incorporating functionality found in BIDS and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), among a host of other features. Prior to this, the BI templates were available only in Visual Studio 2010, SSDT 2010 or SQL Server 2012.

Microsoft Excel tips from Mr. Excel
Bill Jelen, publisher of MrExcel.com, explains one of his favorite Microsoft Excel tips for finance in this video from CFO Rising East 2013. He also discusses the benefits of PowerPivot and explains how to obtain it in different versions of Excel.

The CIO and CMO: An Integrated Approach
Technology now underpins and shapes the entire customer experience, from the delivery of marketing campaigns to the aggregation of analytics and insights. The amount of raw consumer data now available is a major challenge for today’s CMOs; making sense of it, while trying to justify their marketing spend to guarantee ROI, is even harder – especially without a strong bond to the CIO.

With shared infrastructures, security must move with the data
“Really it comes back to security,” Karmel said, “which has to be baked in, not bolted on, at all the different layers of compute, network, storage, and the hypervisor.” IT administrators have to put a set of software-defined security controls around the information that has to be protected. ... The security rules move across physical and virtual infrastructures, giving administrators a single place for enforcement of security controls across DOE and national laboratory environments.

3G and 4G USB modems are a security threat, researcher says
Most 3G/4G modems used in Russia, Europe, and probably elsewhere in the world, are made by Chinese hardware manufacturers Huawei and ZTE, and are branded with the mobile operators’ logos and trademarks, Tarakanov said. Because of this, even if the research was done primarily on Huawei modems from Russian operators, the results should be relevant in other parts of the world as well, he said.

Quote for the day:

"Concentration comes out of a combination of confidence and hunger."-- Arnold Palmer

March 19, 2013

Measuring the ROI of Governance, Risk and Compliance
Governance, risk and compliance (GRC) solutions enable organizations to manage risk and compliance initiatives across the enterprise, helping to reduce loss, improve decision-making about resource allocation, and optimize business performance. ... In this webcast, Nucleus Research will present a Return on Investment model based on the usage of software to centralize the management and identification of enterprise GRC initiatives such as operational risk, financial risk, and IT governance.

Use open source software - it makes things better, says UK
"Use open-source software in preference to proprietary or closed-source alternatives, in particular for operating systems, networking software, web servers, databases and programming languages," says the section for service managers, entitled When to use open source. The UK government has discussed increasing its use of open source since October 2004, when a study of its open-source software trials concluded that computers running Linux generated substantial long-term software and hardware savings.

Zombie Explorer : A N-Tier application from top to bottom
In this award winning article Sacha Barber narrates good and bad things of working with WCF/WPF, some of the bad things being: Ridiculous amount of methods on a service, which become quite unmaintainable quite quickly; Everything is its own service, where you have about 30 WCF services all trying to call each other. Nightmare man; Bad seperation of concerns, where the dependency graph is all screwed up, and your UI inadvertently ends up knowing way to much as it is forced to reference things it has no business knowing about

7 Reasons Why Scrum Fails
Quite often software development projects are set up to execute work using agile methodology, like Scrum, but not setting things up in the right fashion often leads to chaos. Although there is ample information on Scrum (and it’s not exactly rocket science), there are cases where projects have been paralyzed. This article discusses common reasons for such failures and how to avoid them.

The Evolving Role Of Business Architecture
As Brian Hopkins put it – they suffer the common IT problem of “doing it to the business” not “with the business.” Gordon Barnett and I are concerned that as much as 75% of the clients we’ve met had a fear of going to the business to discuss issues – they didn’t see that co-developing capability maps could really help them in engaging their colleagues. They were creating capability maps and present them, often without any real business context. It’s not that business folks don’t see the value in capability maps; it’s that to be relevant, business capability maps have to help solve a problem (that they care about). The two key takeaways:

Internal-use SSL certificates pose security risk for upcoming domain extensions
The advisory was finalized by ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) last week and warns that existing SSL certificates which have been issued for non-public domain names like those used to identify servers inside private networks, could be used to hijack HTTPS traffic for real domain names as new gTLDs become operational. ICANN oversees the Internet's top-level domain name space.

Welcome to Platform 3.0
Over the past few years, we have witnessed the birth, evolution and use of a number of such changes, each of which has the potential to fundamentally change the way we engage with one another. These include: Mobile, Social (both Social Networks and Social Enterprise), Big Data, the Internet of Things, Cloud Computing as well as devices and application architectures. Now however, these once disparate forces are converging – united by the growing Consumerization of Technology and the resulting evolution in user behavior – to create new business models and system designs.

World-Class EA: The Agile Enterprise
The concept of “agile” has recently come to the fore, typically in connection with technical activities, such as software development. Subsequently, the agile approach has been extended and applied to, for example, solution architecture activities. However, we suggest that agile is in fact a way of working, a mindset. It applies to more than just software development, or architecture, or any other one area of activity. The real benefit comes from applying an end-to-end agile delivery approach throughout the enterprise.

McGraw: Mobile app security issues demand trustworthy computing
McGraw, noted application security expert and chief technology officer of Cigital Inc., said improving the many mobile app security issues enterprises face today involves applying the same trustworthy computing philosophies that have helped improve desktop computer security. In this video, recorded at the 2013 RSA Conference, McGraw explains his "trusted on busted" concept and the three biggest fundamental issues affecting enterprise mobile security, his ambivalence on the use of enterprise app stores and his analysis of today's Java security issues.

Losing your Google Reader? Try Tiny Tiny RSS instead
Installing TT is not difficult at all. You just need any Web hosting account with PHP support and access to one MySql or PostGreSql database. Sure, if it is the first time that you try something similar you’ll likely need more than ten minutes, but between the official installation instructions and the extra explanations below you shouldn’t have any problem.

Quote for the day:

"Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching." -- Satchel Paige

March 18, 2013

A Guide for BI Marketers: The Landscape for BI Tools and How to Dominate It
Organizations don't need to purchase nine different tools from nine different vendors. Some large vendors offer suites of BI tools that span multiple technologies. Thus, it is possible for a company to standardize on a single BI vendor whose toolset encompasses all nine technology categories. But this may not be the best strategy since an "all-in-one" solution does not necessarily deliver "best of breed" products.

Big data analytics can help gamemakers be 'next Angry Birds'
The Sogamo platform--which stands for social games analytics, monetization and optimization--is targeted mainly at both social and mobile games, including those created by independent app developers, Li said in an interview. Games form the bulk of the most popular apps at app stores, and social game developers are also moving from Facebook to the mobile space, he added.

The immutability paradigm – or: how to add the “fourth dimension” to our data
Nathan Marz tells us to have a base layer of incoming data. Nothing here gets updated or changed. New records are just attached. From such an immutable data source, we can reconstruct the state of our data set at any given point of time in the past; even if someone messes with the database, we could roll back without the need to reset everything. This rather unstructured worm is of course not fit to get access to information with low latency.

Samsung plans high-end Tizen OS phone
During the New York unveiling, analysts noticed that Samsung barely mentioned that the Galaxy S4 runs on Android. Some speculated that Samsung was setting the stage for greater use of Tizen as an OS. In a Bloomberg news service interview from Seoul, Lee Young Hee, executive vice president of Samsung mobile, said the Tizen smartphone "will be in the high-end category" and "the best product equipped with best specifications."

Windows Blue could give Microsoft's tablet strategy a much needed boost
The reason is that the Windows 8 app ecosystem is starting to finally grow, which would make a clamshell like this much more acceptable to the low end consumer market. And of course, it would be able to runs the tens of thousands Windows applications already on the market.The low end of the market is not a place every OEM is positioned to succeed in, but it is unfortunately the road it looks like Microsoft needs to go down.

Why Consumers Should Care about LTE

LTE’s faster upload and download speed, in turn, will give application developers more options for creating better user experiences on mobile for gaming, banking, socializing, shopping, watching videos and more via the Web or apps. So, in the future when you use mobile banking, you’ll be able to have a live video chat with an advisor about which loan is best for you, or doctors will be able to use telepresence on their mobile to provide consultation to patients anywhere on the globe.

Debunking the Top 10 I.T. Usability Myths
There are a number of common misconceptions as to why the problem persists, according to Nancy Staggers, RN, a professor of Informatics at the University of Maryland’s School of Nursing, and Lorraine Chapman, Director of Use Experience Research at Macadamian Technologies, a user experience design and software development firm that does work in the health care field. But if the IT community is going to solve its usability issues, it must first acknowledge, and then dispel, these wrongly held beliefs.

A Visual History of Linux

Linux started out life as a Minix clone built as a hobby by some guy over in Europe. (OK, it wasn't exactly a Minix clone. But it was built by a guy. And he was in Europe.) Since then, Linux has had a lot of different looks. Let's take a look over a few of the most interesting. Enjoy this slideshow visually narrating the Linux History

Next Steps In Data Center Security
When IT security is a focal point of the State of the Union address, as it was in President Obama's February speech, government IT pros had better take notice. Foreign adversaries are "seeking the ability to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions and our air traffic control systems," the president warned. "We cannot look back years from now and wonder why we did nothing in the face of real threats to our security and our economy."

Nasscom fights to stay relevant in India's tech renaissance

This tension culminated recently when startup think tank, iSpirt--comprising 30 software vendors--announced it was splitting from the services mothership to advocate for the rights of software developers. In an era when the full power of technology is perpetually within consumer hands, there is no doubt future growth will come from indigenous app developers with the resources and skills to build billion-dollar tech businesses, the building blocks of India's own Silicon Valley.

Quote for the day:

"Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors." -- African Proverb

March 17, 2013

Disruptive Technologies – a closer look
Big Bang Disruptions throw many enterprises out of business. Enterprises need to have a strategy to face these disruptive innovations. In this presentation we will go over some such disruptive innovations happened in the past to understand what it is and how some companies have faced these disruptions successfully. We sill also have a look at some of the potential disruptive technologies that are in the making.

AMD's New Laptop Chips Inspired By Mobile Devices, Gaming Consoles
The chips are aimed at laptops and other devices in which screens can be detached for use as tablets. The chips will compete with Intel's Core existing processors based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture and its future chips based on the Haswell microarchitecture, which will be introduced for laptops and tablets this year.

Rising Above the Tide of Emerging Technologies
“How to not only stay afloat, but ahead of emerging technology trends” As an IT professional how do you keep your head above water when the rising tide of technology keeps rolling towards you, wave after wave. In this session we will take a look at some of the key emerging technology trends and drivers that are impacting the “business” of IT and help you find a safe harbor to not only help you stay on top of, but ahead of these fast moving technology waves.

Design Pattern Automation
Software development projects are becoming bigger and more complex every day. The more complex a project the more likely the cost of developing and maintaining the software will far outweigh the hardware cost. There's a super-linear relationship between the size of software and the cost of developing and maintaining it. After all, large and complex software requires good engineers to develop and maintain it and good engineers are hard to come by and expensive to keep around.

How Ford is Putting Hadoop Pedal to the Metal
“For us, it all boils down to functionality; big data is a problem that we need to get over to get to the analytics, but we need flexibility and ease of use so we can just get right to extracting the data and applying our analytics on the backend.” At the core of this statement is what will really differentiate vendor offerings for Ford’s Hadoop engine;

Why Is Apple’s Stock Falling?
The market scene purely reflects the sentiments from Apple's shareholders. Investors are dumping their stock as financial pundits and growth investors are predicting that Apple's growth seems far too limited, given the current scenario. While several investors are still keen on seeing Apple enter and revolutionize another product category. So when some investors dump their stock (and these are the big ones), someone else must take it and these are - more of price conscious buyers - who won't put a great price tag on the stock.

Project Management and Portfolio Management: The Balance of Your Business
What’s more important to your business, project management or project portfolio management? The simple answer is that they both matter, of course. But don’t brush the question aside – the precise balance between project management and project portfolio management (PPM) in your business can make all the difference to your bottom line.

CSOs must adopt new risk management trends
Security managers are working with senior executives in all divisions across their organizations to move away from compliance-focused thinking towards a risk-based approach to information security. The shift requires senior management and C-level executives to think about risk strategically versus simply crossing off regulatory check boxes.

Interview and Book Excerpt: Mastering the Requirements Process
Suzanne and James Robertson authored the 3rd edition of their book Mastering the Requirements Process. This edition includes material focused on the challenges of requirements in modern project environments, including agile and outsourcing relationships. They present a number of Fundamental Truths which underlie their approach.

Walmart Makes Big Data Part of Its DNA
Walmart started using big data even before the term big data became known in the industry and in 2012 they moved from an experiential 10-node Hadoop cluster to a 250-node Hadoop cluster. At the same time they developed new tools to migrate their existing data on Oracle, Netezza and Greenplum hardware to their own systems. The objective was to consolidate 10 different websites into one website and store all incoming data in the new Hadoop cluster.

Quote for the day:

"The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind." -- Wayne Dyer

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