July 31, 2014

Develop and Implement your customized plan for adopting healthy agile-lean practices
Effective impediment management can be learned with practice and improved with process maturity and experience; management support is still needed for removing organizational impediments. As multiplexing and multitasking reduces, and the team starts following Stop-Starting-Start-Finishing lean mantra, the number of NT events should reduce over a period of time. Moving away from non-lean behaviors (3B and 4B) to healthy agile-lean practices (3P and 4P), shown along the Y-dimension of Figure 1 is a challenge that can be addressed at the team-level. It usually doesn’t depend on and need not wait for senior management support.


Infographic: Capitalizing on the Internet of Things
Let us give you three figures that show why the IoT creates challenges both long-term and immediate. First, consider the number of IP-enabled devices such as cars, heating systems or production machines. Based on research by the analyst firm Machina Research 14 billion of those things will be connected by 2022. Second, the ITU predicts that by 2015, 75 percent of the world’s population will have internet access. And third, the omnipresent mobile revolution: according to the mobile forecast from Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, more than 3 billion smartphones and tablets will be in use globally by 2017.


Hulu Chooses Cassandra Over HBase and Riak
“We looked at HBase and Riak at first,” said Rangel. “Cassandra was an afterthought.” ... “With Cassandra, it managed to handle the load, it’s very reliable, it allows range queries without limitations, and it’s easy to maintain,” said Rangel. “It’s night and day compared to HBase.” The team had to do some hardware changes because Cassandra specs are different. Cassandra is optimized for SSDs, which improved performance. Rangel also said that Cassandra was better at replication.


Attention Agile Programmers: Project Management is not Software Engineering
Many software developers today are working on client/server systems such as Web sites and Smartphone Apps. These systems are based on the exchange of requests and responses between a client and a server. In such systems, the Latency is the time interval between the moment the request is sent and the moment the response is received. The Throughput is the rate the requests are handled, i.e., how many requests are responded per unit of time. In client/server systems it is essential to constantly measure the latency and the throughput. A small code change, such as making an additional query to the database, may have a big impact on both.


Answer to OTP Bypass: Out-of-Band Two-Factor Authentication
When users attempt to visit their bank’s landing page, they get redirected to a fake bank page that steals their username/password. Then, they’re asked to type in the one-time password (OTP) sent by their bank’s mobile app - but, the SMS never arrives, so then the website prompts the user to install a malicious mobile app that’s pretending to be an OTP generator. Whew. This malicious Android app actually intercepts the real two-factor SMS tokens sent by the bank, thereby gaining access to the user’s account and stealing all their monies.


LibreOffice 4.3: The best open-source office suite gets better
According to Coverity, "LibreOffice has done an excellent job of addressing key defects in their code in the short time they have been part of the Coverity Scan service." Like previous versions, LibreOffice is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows systems. You can also run an older version, LibreOffice 4.2, from the cloud using a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. With the United Kingdom making LibreOffice's native ODF its default format for government documents, LibreOffice is certain to become more popular. Other cash-strapped governments, such as Italy's Umbria province, have found switching to LibreOffice from Microsoft Office has saved them hundreds of thousands of Euros per thousand PCs.


'Software-defined' to define data center of the future
Simply being written in software shouldn't qualify as "software-defined"; the term should also apply to the overall resource served (e.g., networking or storage). Just as there are network switches for SDN, appropriately designed hardware and firmware solutions should exist for software-definable infrastructure. In other words, a well-designed physically assembled pool of modular (possibly proprietary and/or highly specialized) resource units could be elastically provisioned, dynamically partitioned and configured programmatically.


A New Hat for Negotiators
Kopelman, who broadly defines negotiations, thinks that even more enlightened win-win negotiators can find themselves impaired by the hat they wear. It’s as if the negotiator’s hat includes a set of blinders that artificially limits the options of every party in the negotiation. She says that we all wear multiple hats in our lives, and that each one represents a different role that comes with its own resources and constraints. (For instance, a business executive may also be a parent, a child, a spouse, a soccer fan, a scuba diver, or a church deacon.) But, Kopelman says, if we can integrate our hats, we might be able to use their combined assets to negotiate in a more genuine way and craft superior outcomes.


Top 5 Wearable Tech You Haven’t Heard of Yet
Forecast calls for 19 billion connected things by 2016, and the wearable technology sector is set to skyrocket from $3-5 billion in revenue to $30-50 billion over the next 2 years. The economic impact estimates as high as $14 trillion over the next decade (AllthingsCK.com). The products in beta and those already created are leading in the market. Fitbit fitness devices are available in 30,000 retail stores across 27 countries worldwide (Amazon published rankings). Google Glass expanded with Google Contact Lens. And the market for jackets that navigate, dresses that change color with mood, and bras that can track your heart rate are popping up everywhere.


Big Digital Leadership
Technology trends such as big data and the Cloud are driving the IT agenda, as are technology-fuelled trends such as mobility and social media. Increased user empowerment as demonstrated by the Byod movement is changing the CIO’s role from technology manager to digital leader. This white paper explores these trends from a strategic perspective. It also offers operational advice thus enabling you to turn these emerging themes into business value.



Quote for the day:

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. -- Steve Jobs

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