September 17, 2016

What’s Wrong With Using Design Templates?

Contrary to templates which are designed for a broad business category, custom designs are built by experts to meet specific business needs. A great website is more than stunning visuals and smart widgets. Custom designs are personalized at a conceptual level, delivering great user experience on desktop or mobile, and engaging users to follow your calls-to-action. Founded on the business brand, custom web design allows more control over creative elements, helping businesses to forge a meaningful connection with their audiences. With custom design comes customized support of a designer able to perfectly align the look of the website with specific business needs. If you're opting for a custom design, here are some questions you should ask your web designer


How the startup world is bringing digital nomadism closer to reality

One of the trickiest things about travel is dealing with different time zones. WTB is a world clock converter and meeting scheduler that lets you schedule personal and professional events at a glance over multiple time zones. With a number of useful features, like Google Calendar integration, WTB is a great newer tool for working away from home. WTB has not disclosed funding information. According to reports, growth took a dive around November 2015, but shot back up in December 2015, and has maintained steady growth through 2016. As remote work continues to grow and more people refuse to compromise lifestyle for professional success, the digital nomad lifestyle is now even more attainable. If you’ve ever dreamed of leaving the cubicle behind and hitting the road, these startups provide the insider help you need to make it happen.


ViaWest: How Cloud Computing Alters Data Center Design

Now, certain well-known data center customers — Leonard cites Akamai as one example — are moving from a 12-15 kW per rack power usage profile down to about 9 kW/rack. Service providers are capable of making such deliberate changes to their applications to enable this kind of energy efficiency. Suppose a hypothetical SP customer of this same data center is inspired by Akamai, re-architects its application, and lowers its power consumption. “Well, now they can’t use the power that’s in that space,” argues Leonard. “Creating space where power and cooling are irretrievably tied to the floor space that is being delivered on is a really bad idea. When the use of that floor space, power, and cooling changes over time — and there’s a dozen dimensions that can cause it to change — those data centers are rigid and inflexible in their ability to react to those changes.”


Reasoning About Software Quality Attributes

Attribute primitives provide building blocks for constructing architectures. However, they are building blocks with a focus on achieving quality attribute goals such as performance, reliability and modifiability goals. Quality attribute design primitives will be codified in a manner that illustrates how they contribute to the achievement of quality attributes. Therefore each attribute primitive will be described not only in terms of their constituent components and connectors, but also in terms of the qualitative and/or quantitative models that can be used to argue how they affect quality attributes. Consider an example: the client/server attribute primitive. This is collaboration between the providers and users of set of services. The attribute primitive separates one collection of responsibilities (the client's) from another (the server's).


Code ownership and software quality

The owner of source code usually refers to the person who implemented the code. However, larger code artifacts, such as files, are usually composed by multiple engineers contributing to the entity over time through a series of changes. Frequently, the person with the highest contribution, in terms of lines written or code changes made, is defined as the code owner and takes responsibility for it. ... Weak ownership means distributing the responsibility for a particular part of software among multiple developers. We speculated that code without a primary owner might have no champion who will take responsibility to maintain and test the code. Without such code owners, knowledge about the inner working and functionality of code might be limited and once lost completely, it might take time to recover. Overtime, such files become more susceptible to bugs.


How to Keep Your Passwords, Financial & Personal Information Safe

Keeping your passwords, financial, and other personal information safe and protected from outside intruders has long been a priority of businesses, but it's increasingly critical for consumers and individuals to heed data protection advice and use sound practices to keep your sensitive personal information safe and secure. There's an abundance of information out there for consumers, families, and individuals on protecting passwords, adequately protecting desktop computers, laptops, and mobile devices from hackers, malware, and other threats, and best practices for using the Internet safely. But there's so much information that it's easy to get confused, particularly if you're not tech-savvy. We've compiled a list of 101 simple, straightforward best practices and tips for keeping your family's personal information private and protecting your devices from threats.


The end of password expiry

So, should we force users to change passwords, and if so, how often? It's not an easy question to answer and the industry seems divided in its opinion – for some, requiring people to change them often is bad, as it may encourage poor password choices and re-use of passwords on different sites, while others suggest it should be monthly or more for access to corporate applications and systems. In a recent Centrify survey, it was alarming to see how much password sharing between employees happens – often to enable a colleague to do work they can't usually do from their own account. Regular enforced password change would help ensure the person the password is being shared with would be unable to log in if they leave the company, albeit there would be a window of time when they still could.


Improving security, efficiency, and user experience in digital transformation

Humans can still be bugged or tricked into revealing their passwords. There is malware, or malicious software installed on computers; there is phishing, in which cyber crooks grab login, credit card, and other data in the guise of legitimate-seeming websites or apps; and there are even “zero day” attacks, in which hackers exploit overlooked software vulnerabilities. And of course, old-fashioned human attacks persist, including shoulder-surfing to observe users typing in their passwords, dumpster-diving to find discarded password information, impersonating authority figures to extract passwords from subordinates, discerning information about the individual from social media sources to change their password, and employees selling corporate passwords.


Enterprise-architecture – a changes report

In other words, at this stage – in the mid-2000s – all of this mainstream ‘enterprise’-architecture was still strictly IT-centric. For example, whilst the FEAF PRM briefly mentions ‘Human Capital’ and ‘Other Fixed Assets’, there’s nothing in that specification that actually describes them in any significant detail. For anything more than that, we had to turn to industry-specific frameworks such as eTOM or SCOR, or else roll our own. And where ‘enterprise’ is mentioned at all in the mainstream ‘EA’-frameworks, there’s also an assumption that ‘the organisation’ and ‘the enterprise’ are one and the same. By the time of the launch of TOGAF 9, in 2009, this becomes more overt: there’s an implication that whilst there must be some clients out there somewhere, they’re essentially ‘out-of-scope’ for the architecture, and that the maximum reach we’d need to worry about as enterprise-architects is an ‘inside-out’ view of the business-world


Dear CIO/CFO: “What is Enterprise Architecture?”

First, Enterprise Architects – real Enterprise Architects – are not “smarter” than everyone else. They do, however, have a very specific skill set and a level of experience of understanding that a systems view (People, Process, and Technology) is more important than a point solution perspective. I accept that what they produce and provide can be profoundly of value to an organization that wishes to understand itself and how the organization might improve “efficiencies”. They can provide an incredible amount of corporate intelligence to you, but this is nothing that a CIO or CFO should fear. Real Enterprise Architects are your personal “007”. Remember, James Bond still works under “M”, right? Enterprise Architecture is not, what many CIOs and CFOs seem to constantly tell me, about “pretty network diagrams”. No, that is “Network Architecture”.



Quote for the day:


"Having more data does not always give you the power to make better decisions." -- Jeffrey Fry


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