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

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