May 09, 2014

Talk of an Internet Fast Lane Is Already Hurting Some Startups
Burnham says his firm will now “stay away from” startups working on video and media businesses. It will also avoid investing in payment systems or in mobile wallets, which require ultrafast transaction times to make sense. “This is a bad scene for innovation in those areas,” Burnham says of the FCC proposal. This will be the third time the FCC has tried to impose regulations on discrimination in data delivery, following two losses on earlier versions in federal court (see “Net Neutrality Quashed: New Pricing, Throttling, and Business Models to Follow”). The latest proposal has been interpreted as a reversal, in that it would allow carriers to charge extra for certain services.


How to banish shadow IT: Deliver enterprise apps and services that users want
"Business users can go out and buy SaaS without involving the sourcing professionals at their organisations - and many of them do because it is quick and easy and meets their needs at a point in time," said analyst group Forrester Research in a January 2014 report, which references a single organisation with "hundreds of instances of self-provisioned SaaS". Where there's a crossover between tools that are useful both inside and outside of work, targeting consumers is sometimes seen as an effective way of getting that service into the workplace, according to Richard Absalom, senior analyst for enterprise mobility at Ovum.


How to Build a Software Developer Talent Pipeline
Building a sales pipeline of potential customers can help ensure greater success in closing deals and driving new business, and the same goes when you're looking to hire elite software developers and programmers, says Vivek Ravisankar, founder and CEO of HackerRank. "Hiring developers is a lot like sales in that you have to build a pipeline to close 'deals,'" Ravisankar says. "Sure, you can go to a recruiter right now and have them do 'cold calls' to developers, but what you don't know is are they decent? Do their values and talent align with your company? Are they invested in your company's success as well as their own? That's hard to discern," he says.


Hyperscale Invades the Enterprise Data Center
Everyone is talking about the software defined data center, but they are ignoring the physical data center itself. Amazon doesn’t even want to build new data centers – as Wikibon CTO David Floyer describes, Mega Data Centers are the Future. Building a data center is typically a 25+ year commitment that typically has inefficiencies in power/cooling, no flexibility in cabling and no mobility within or between data centers. The software of the data center must go beyond the infrastructure stacks and include the surrounding support systems. Through the use of hybrid clouds and PODS, the data center can be managed independent of physical location.


Why Organizations Need to Grow Capacity and Performance Management Skills
"To take advantage of Web-scale IT approaches to capacity and performance management, IT architects need to fully embrace stateless application architectures and horizontally scaling infrastructure architectures," said Ian Head. Adding additional central processing units (CPUs), memory and storage to a monolithic server has been the traditional, vertical way of scaling up applications while capacity planning has traditionally been developed with the goal of forecasting the requirements for this vertical scaling approach. However, vertical architectures and approaches have limited scalability, making vertical architectures unsuitable for hyperscaling. For service capacity to expand seamlessly to extremely large scales, different approaches are required.


AIG's Chief Science Officer: 'It's Not All About the Numbers'
“It isn’t about what you know, it’s about how you learn,” Buluswar said. “The vision behind the creation of the science team was: As the world around us changes exponentially, the winners will win big, but they will be removed from their perches faster. So it requires a fair bit of agility.” Agility, in the context of the discussion relates to not only the creation of new problem solving abilities, but the requirement that those abilities are then brought to bear on the actual problems insurers are confronted with. “The thinking that created the problem can’t be the same as for the solutions, Buluswar said, paraphrasing Albert Einstein. Data driven decision making, he said, can be simultaneously incremental, transformative and disruptive.


Why Some Doctors Like Google Glass So Much
Like people in the wider population, some doctors doubt Glass’s usefulness. Emergency physicians in general are very technology savvy, Horng says, but they vary in their enthusiasm for the pilot project. “You’ve got the really early adopters that will try anything and just like new technology, and then you’ve got the other side that just refuses to get away from their clipboard, and so they are never going to use it,” he says. But plenty of doctors seem excited, and they do not see Glass as a barrier to patient-doctor interaction. “The advent of electronic health records has significantly changed that [doctor-patient] relationship,” he told the audience at Google’s Cambridge event.


Windows 8.1 users face patch ban as Microsoft sets next week's updates
"Microsoft will include the 'out-of-band' from last week in this month's IE update," said Storms, using the term for the emergency patch Microsoft shipped May 1. "But it wouldn't hurt to double-check." The other critical update, named "Bulletin 2" in the advanced notice, will apply to SharePoint Server 2007, 2010 and 2013. SharePoint Server has been patched twice already this year -- in both January and April -- as well as in December 2013. "SharePoint is one of those critical back-end office servers, in the same bucket as Exchange and SQL Server," said Storms. "So it will be important to move gingerly and important to test properly before deploying it."


Testing Ubuntu, Debian and LMDE on my new notebook
There is one thing concerning UEFI boot configuration that I would like to mention. Ubuntu was one of the first Linux distributions that could be installed with UEFI boot, which was commendable — but they accomplished that with a rather complicated procedure after installation which used a "Boot Repair" utility to rewrite parts of the configuration.  I have to admit that I have never used that procedure, or that utility — and that is exactly the point I want to make. It is not necessary to follow that procedure any more, the UEFI boot configuration can be set up to dual-boot (or multi-boot) Ubuntu and Windows 8 using nothing more than the system BIOS configuration and the standard Linux efibootmgr utility. I did just that for this installation, and it worked perfectly.


Database Continuous Delivery
Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment are the common principles and practices to structurally handle the process of automation and set ground rules for the many participants in the development, build, test, and release of the software process. These principles are not new, but they are gaining traction and adoption as they prove their benefits, just like Agile development did some years ago. As a set of principles and practices, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment are not a case of 'one size fits all.' It is important to understand that every company might have its own unique challenges and these practices should be tuned to fit organizational structure and culture processes.



Quote for the day:

"Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty." -- Emile M. Cioran

No comments:

Post a Comment