Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

September 11, 2012

GM to hire 10,000 IT pros as it 'insources' work
The announcement is part of far-reaching GM plan to hire as many as 10,000 IT workers worldwide over the next three to five years as the automaker takes work back from outsourcers, the company said.

VMs and backups: are yours securely stored, or indexed in Google?
Through recent research, I've unearthed an alarming number of VMs and backups in Google's index from companies, universities, and home users. Make sure your directories are protected!

Big Data: The perils of past performance
With Big Data especially, pundits and vendors imply that if we throw bigger and better data at a faster platform, we’ll eventually be able to predict the future with near certainty. Here’s why this is wrong.

Power, people and enterprise-architecture
People are great at transforming between energies – converting excitement and motivation into physical work, for example, or gaining aspirational satisfaction from resolving a technical challenge. But they’re also great at avoiding the work – and that’s where the problem really lies.

Are Application Frameworks Obsolete?
Frameworks aren’t obsolete, but most organizations often get it wrong when building them. Why is this? Often it's because frameworks are derived from a successful project and repurposed (often bringing too many characteristics of the original project with it), or designed by committee, with not enough consideration to how they might be used by a family of actual software products.

Google brings Big Query down to earth with Excel Connector
Google designed BigQuery as a cloud service for running fast queries against massive datasets, but with lofty ambitions there’s always room to take a step back. Now, users that don’t require super speed can run batch queries, and can connect to the service using Microsoft Excel

Enabling Big Data Analytics Inside of Hadoop: A Spotlight Q&A with Justin Borgman of Hadapt
This BeyeNETWORK Spotlight features Ron Powell's interview with Justin Borgman, Co-Founder and CEO of Hadapt. Justin explains how Hadapt integrates SQL and Hadoop in a single unified platform – no connectors, complexities, or rigid structure, and he shares the resultant benefits of that approach.

Step Into the Office-Less Company
The company has a San Francisco office for occasional use, but project management, brainstorming and water-cooler chatter take place on internal blogs. If necessary, team members fly around the world to meet each other face to face. And if people have sensitive questions, they pick up the phone.

U.K. Finally Gets 4G Mobile As Everything Everywhere Arrives
Britain today got its very own 4G mobile network as new provider EE launched with a promise of Nokia flagship smartphones and veiled hint that the new iPhone might also be on its books. The service will be switched on in London, Cardiff, Bristol and Birmingham today, and will envelop another 12 cities by the end of 2012.

25 tech toys for $25 or less
These items are useful, innovative and sometimes offbeat in a geeky way. So go ahead -- dig deep between the sofa cushions, and check your change jar. Chances are good that you'll find more than one budget-friendly gadget to buy.

Quote for the day:

"People are persuaded by reason, but moved by emotion; the leader must both persuade them and move them." - Richard M. Nixon

September 10, 2012

Big Data Data Governance
Many big data (i.e., NoSQL) projects are running ungoverned in many ways – lack of data governance being only one. After speaking with many on those projects, as a rule, I don’t think they don’t want to do data governance with their big data projects.

The Power of Subtraction
By removing things one creates self-imposed constraints, but also clarity and a cleaner context for inspired innovation... Here are five "laws of subtraction" for business leaders to consider:

Operation Australia claims attack on government websites
Tweeting from the @Op_Australia account, the hackers claimed to have brought down the websites belonging to the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), the Australian Federal Police (AFP), the prime minister, and federal Attorney-General Nicola Roxon.

Making sense of human resources and big data
... the need for HR to become more numbers- or evidence-based (before that was the common term) and how it should develop its own expertise and theories about what data analytics would help. It wasn’t happening then and it’s hard to get a handle on how much is actually happening now, or what it can actually do for HR.

Some key elements for Open Government Accountability and Interoperability
Presentation of Carlos E. Jiménez, from IEEE, in the International Open Government Data Conference 2012, Co-sponsored by the U.S. General Services Administration, Data.gov, the World Bank Open Data Initiative and the Open Development Technology Alliance.

Open Data, a New Platform for Cities
In this always-developing technology of data analytics, many cities have already witnessed improvements in services. At a time when infrastructure funding at the federal level has been cut, U.S. cities are embracing technologies that lower costs while improving services. Global cities are also benefiting from the cost-savings of data analytics.

Android Smartphones To Power NASA Satellites
In October, NASA plans to send a two-pound, ten-ounce cube-shaped satellite the size of a coffee cup into space aboard a rocket launched from Wallops Island, Va. However, it's not just the size of the satellite that likely will pique curiosity, but the fact that the on-board electronics will consist of the guts of HTC Nexus One and Samsung Nexus S smartphones running Android.

Where PayPal leads in solving failure others must follow
PayPal's president is getting personally and publicly involved with account management. Enterprise software vendors should follow his example but will they?

Levels of Abstractions in Big Data
While this is certainly true of any type of software, the consequences are even more severe in the area of Big Data because abstractions there are often quite new and potentially imperfect and because there is considerably more technical lock-in into a given solution.

Cloudnymous launches cloud-based privacy cloak
Startup Cloudnymous has launched a new cloud-based anonymous VPN service which lets users access any restricted or censored website.

Best advanced compact cameras
You might already own an SLR, but would like the convenience of a smaller camera. On the other hand, you might just be getting into photography, and want a camera that will grow with you as your skills improve. Here are some of the most competent compacts for advanced photographers, and anyone looking for a little more control.

Quotes for the day:

“Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.” -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If there is no door to your dream, create one.” -- E'yen A. Gardner

September 09, 2012

Four Principles to Successful Operational Leadership
Success in operational leadership, whether it is data-center operations, service delivery operations, restaurant operations; or just about any operational capacity, comes down to four main components: People, Processes, Policies, and Systems.

Big Data Week – Introduction from Kalev H Leetaru
Kalev H. Leetaru is Assistant Director for Text and Digital Media Analytics at the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science at the University of Illinois and Center Affiliate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He introduces Big Data Week (www.bigdataweek.com) and gives us an overview of the future of big data and the challenges ahead.

8 Elements That Make A Great SaaS Website
Building a useful and beautiful website is difficult. It takes a lot of time, thought, and energy. And in the end, visitors might not even like it. Here, I will break down what some of the best SaaS (Software as a Service) companies do with their websites. I won’t be telling you how to build your website. Instead, I’ll be giving you some ideas to keep in mind during your first build or redesign.

Moving to the cloud: How to get started
Should enterprises start their journey to the cloud by migrating existing applications? I don’t believe so. I would strongly recommend you understand how cloud actually works before deciding which applications to migrate to the cloud. That will give you a good understanding of what cloud really is, what value it will give you and how to best implement it.

Here Comes Microsoft’s Cloud OS & Trouble for VMware
Server 2012 has its own gussied-up virtualization, networking, storage, automation and end-user access. CPU, storage and networking systems are virtualized and cloud-enabled. It's also supposed to support the exponential growth of data and devices.

Data Governance Considerations for Master Data Management
This brief article provides the list of ways that Data Governance can be applied to the disciplines associated with Master Data Management. The article simply provides the lists I used in the webinar.

Tech’s New Wave, Driven by Data
This one, many researchers and entrepreneurs say, will be based on smarter machines and software that will automate more tasks and help people make better decisions in business, science and government. And the technological building blocks, both hardware and software, are falling into place, stirring optimism.

A Year Without a Computer
Could you succeed in every aspect of your job using just a smartphone or tablet? One exec decided to try it for a year. ... The verdict? It's doable--with the right combination of accessories, apps, patience, and determination.

Testing 2.0
It’s amazing what has happened in the field of test in the last 20 years... a lot of “art” has turned into “science”. Computer scientists, engineers, and many other disciplines have worked on provable systems and calculus, pioneered model based testing, invented security fuzz testing, and even settled on a common pattern for unit tests called xunit. The xunit pattern shows up in open source software like JUnit as well as in Microsoft development test tools.

Is Brainstorming Brain Dead?
Group brainstorming sessions might produce a higher volume of ideas than a single person would but groups don’t produce higher qualityideas. A small number of people often dominate the conversation and group think almost always happens as a result of peer pressure.

Quotes for the day:

"If you have no critics you'll likely have no success." -- M.Forbes

"If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near." -- Jack Welch

September 08, 2012

NASSCOM: Marketing Analytics Set to Boom
India’s global trade body The National Association of Software and Service Companies says India is perfectly poised to capitalize on the emerging demand for marketing analytics.

Modest IT Hiring Expected Through 2012
... areas where applicants were lacking, general IT expertise led the way (58 percent), followed by an absence of desire to stay on top of tech trends (27 percent) and no knowledge of legislation connected to the field (6 percent)

Elite hacker gang has unlimited supply of zero-day bugs
"We've never seen a group use so many zero-days," said Cox in an interview today. "We were amazed when Stuxnet used four zero-days, but this group has been able to discover eight zero-days. More, the fact that they have prepared [their attacks] and are ready to go as soon as they have a new zero-day, and the speed with which they use these zero-days, is something we've not seen before."

5 Underutilized LinkedIn Marketing Tools
While entrepreneurs might already be aware of important features such as its custom groups or the Question and Answer section, there are a number of tools and features that the professional networking site offers that have gone mostly unnoticed.

Data - It Shouldn't Be This Hard: Lessons From the Trenches
In this brief video, Peter Aiken, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Information Systems, Virginia Commonwealth University; president, DAMA International; founder, Data Blueprint, talks about the status of organizational analytics

Connecting with traditional business language and conventions
John Hagel believes exploiting process exceptions is the way to find value in social initiatives; the challenge is often finding a common language with the business world

10 Reasons Disaster Recovery Plans Fail
“In the last three to four years, organizations have cut back the amount that they are testing and updating their disaster recovery plans,” Janulaitis says. “That’s something they can’t put off. Organizations have to step up and keep these plans up to date.”

Michigan State University to Introduce Students to Analytics and Big Data Using IBM Watson
The new collaboration between IBM and MSU is part of an ongoing effort to expand and strengthen student skills and understanding of big data and analytics in order to meet the growing demand for highly skilled analytics workers.

Operationalizing Data Governance
Any approach to operationalizing an organization’s overall Data Management role must include a look at the integration of business and IT Metadata, Data Quality methodologies, and finally implementing Data Governance along with stewardship.

DISA's Five-Year Strategic Information Infrastructure Plan
The plan sets out four strategic goals for the next five years, the first being to “Evolve the Joint Information Environment.” DISA wants to provide end-to-end enterprise services to the entire Department of Defense that are seamless, interoperable, efficient, and responsive to joint and coalition needs.

Big Data in Your Blood
Boston-based company called MC10 will offer the first of several “stretchable electronics” products that can be put on things like shirts and shoes, worn as temporary tattoos or installed in the body.

Quote for the day:

"The ability to summon positive emotions during periods of intense stress lies at the heart of effective leadership." — -- Jim Loehr

September 07, 2012

The Quantum of Integration
Now, shift the perspective on integration from technology to business. First, the real problem is not that it is too difficult to integrate applications. That’s a subset of the broader issue - it is too expensive to access, maintain, and secure information required to carryout business. Furthermore, it is too costly to change processes in response to evolving business strategy.

Enterprise Architects For Dummies (CEOs)
As Dave Baker of PwC notes, "A business without a design is one that is likely to be overly complex, expensive, inefficient and unaligned." Or as Raja Musunuru, from Gaylord Entertainment Company, says, "It's the difference between the roads in Boston and the roads in Toronto."

Application Performance Problems
The survey indicated that 12 percent of the organizations face application performance problems on a regular basis whereas 43 percent deal with the same once every month. A further 27 percent experienced such issues almost every three months.

Secrets Behind Paychecks of CIOs
According to Lidia Fonseca, CIO of LabCorp, IT executives are measured and paid in the same ways as other senior officers. She states, “For us, it's not just aligning with the business. IT has to be ‘in’ the business. That has been a key driver in being an effective CIO.”

Achieve Scriptless Test Automation Utopia!
Join Darshan Jani in this live webcast on September 13, 2012 as he sheds light on solutions for automated testing and improving ROI through automated scriptless testing. Requires free registration.

IT Managers Bet on Business Analytics
BA has been making inroads slowly into organisations and throwing up huge opportunity for the IT heads and enabling them to provide information in real time to help the business groups to make informed decisions.

Justifying RoI the Holistic Way
The reason being there are no clear metrics worked out on RoI or payback revolving around the said investment or even the real value-add provided. The benefit factor of any technology is overlooked and it would be anybody’s guess what benefits it would entail.

India's big data market to hit $1B in 2015
The Times of India, citing a report by the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) and Crisil, reported on Wednesday the country's big data industry is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 83 percent from US$200 million this year to reach the projected US$1 billion in some three years' time.

Microsoft banks on India's developer ecosystem to drive Windows Phone
Redmond has been focusing its efforts and offering incentives to encourage app development on its mobile OS, which was launched in India several months after the global launch.

Germany pushes for an end to massive fines for hijacked Wi-Fi
Under current German law, the Wi-Fi network owner could be held liable as an accessory to the crime and face the same prison term or fine as the individual who committed the offence.

The Value of the PoC in Enterprise Architecture
The perception of enterprise architecture can be badly damaged when the actual implementation of this architecture fails to meet cost, time, or usability expectations. Building a small version of the planned solution before making a large resource commitment and business dependency on the outcome can demonstrate the value of Enterprise Architecture and greatly reduce the risk of wasted resources and lost opportunities.

instant Data Quality at Work
iDQ™ is basically a very advanced search engine capable of being integrated into business processes in order to get data quality for contact data right the first time and at the same time reduce the time needed for looking up and entering contact data.

Quotes for the day:

"Hire character. Train skill." -- Peter Schutz

It is impossible to give what you don't have. Invest in your leadership. Keep learning!

September 06, 2012

Dan Swinhoe (Asia)- Opportunities in India: Spoilt For Choice
India's economy is still growing despite global troubles, and the electronics industry is expected to explode to $400 billion by 2020. Its ICT sector has risen from $5.7 billion in 2000 to almost $100 billion today. But where is there left to go for growth?

Nokia launches Lumia phones with focus on optics, wireless charging, augmented reality
Harlow demonstrated how the augmented reality feature, called CityLens, allows a user to hold the phone up to a city street and see names of restaurants and stores appear on the display hovering over images of the buildings.

VMworld 2012: Bowing in the Presence of Greatness!'
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger made an excellent point when he said that the infrastructure was modernized, but our internal processes and operations are still the same. His point was, we cannot update and modernize the infrastructure and keep the same old processes and approaches. I completely agree.

Review: Google Compute Engine rocks the cloud
Google Compute Engine gives you a clean, Google-esque Web dashboard to create instances, assign them to zones, and monitor their status. So far, you can choose from Ubuntu and CentOS images.

Can mobility escape the security snare?
“We’re starting to see more common vocabulary and framework to even have a conversation about security issues,” he said. “Beyond that, it’s a matter of looking at federal agencies and their various levels on risk tolerance as it relates to security.”

Security for a Faster World
For organizations like yours the problem isn’t solely the need to improve your capacity to support these new computing models, you must also ensure that security risks are managed and customer data, corporate intellectual property and company reputation are protected.

Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me..!
Usually, this saying is offered up to remind us not to be fooled by tricksters, those folks that offering you something that sounds too good to be true, and that almost always is. So, try to avoid being taken for a ride, and for heaven’s sakes, don’t be taken for a ride a second time.

Top 10 Competencies for Change Leaders
What competencies do leaders and agents need to excel at in order to be successful? Are you building a Community of Practice or Centre of Excellence? What’s on your list? Below is a top-ten list for change leaders.

Cloud Computing Compliance Hazy For Banks
While the bank says it's confident that it's in compliance, the guidance has come under fire in the bank tech industry for an alleged lack of precision in defining cloud computing and specific risks that could create security gaps.

Cooks, Chefs and Data Governance
Although implementing data governance policies does occasionally require a cook-adept-at-carrying-out-a-recipe mindset, the long-term success of a data governance program is going to also require chefs since the dynamic challenges faced, and overcome daily, by business analysts, data stewards, technical architects, and others, exemplify today’s constantly changing business world, which can not be successfully governed by forcing employees to systematically apply rules or follow rigid procedures.

GreenSQL First to Provide Full Database Security on the Cloud for Microsoft® SQL Azure™
GreenSQL's software-based solution is installed as a front-end to SQL Azure; it fully camouflages and secures the Azure database, dynamically masks sensitive and confidential data in real-time, and provides monitoring and auditing of data access and administrative activities. Its caching dramatically increases database performance, reducing latency in cloud environments. By using GreenSQL, companies comply with regulations such as HIPAA, PCI, SOX, and Basel II.

Quotes for the day:

"There is little success where there is little laughter." --Andrew Carnegie

"The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities." -- Stephen Covey

September 05, 2012

Orange turns Samsung Galaxy S III into 'Quick Tap' payments device
The system is based on near-field communication (NFC) technology, which is fast becoming a staple feature of smartphones, and now Quick Tap has come to the flagship Android smartphone of the day

How Four Financial Giants Crunch Big Data
According to Allen Weinberg, co-leader of the Banking and Securities Technology and Operations practice at research group, McKinsey & Co, financial services organizations often scratch their heads when it comes to rationalizing investments in big data. After all, they argue, isn’t this something they’ve been investing in for years—albeit without the fancy buzzword?

Big Data: The Current State of ETL into and on Hadoop
Organizations can now leverage Hadoop to cost-effectively store and process massive amounts of data on the order of petabytes without having to resort to the bad habits of hand-coding ET

India IT firms need to keep faith in software, services
Despite their recent poor performances, India's top IT vendors should still focus on innovating in software and services but find lucrative niches to capitalize.

Data Monetization in the World of Big Data
Digital media companies like Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Twitter have worked to master the data monetization process. They have to, as their entire business is built on data. These companies work with bytes, unlike most other companies who work with atoms to build physical products like shoes, tractors, houses, and burrito bowls with double chicken and guacamole.

Beauty is in The Eye of the Beholder
In this InfoQ presentation, Alex Papadimoulis attempts to define ugly code, how one can recognize it, providing advice on avoiding writing such code and refactoring old code to get rid of it.

Windows Identity Foundation in the .NET Framework 4.5 Beta: Tools, Samples, Claims Everywhere
With .NET 4.5, WIF ceases to exist as a standalone deliverable. Its classes, formerly housed in the Microsoft.IdentityModel assembly & namespace, are now spread across the framework as appropriate.

Outsourcing Weathers IT Skills Gap with the Cloud
Cloud computing and as-a-service are emerging as a viable choice over staff offshoring as a way to address the gap in IT skills with enterprise application development and data programs, according to a new market assessment.

IBM SmartCloud Enterprise Webinar
What's new in SmartCloud Enterprise? Release 2.1, that's what—from new service level agreements to data centre upgrades. See it in action during our Webinar on Septermber 6.

The Future of Big Data: Crawling Over Broken Glass?
The early adopters were not the people in the glass houses, the data center managers. Rather, they were marketing managers and other business executives, eager to circumvent the ever-so-slow IT department and have complete control of new applications, especially the new data mining tools that allowed them to gain new insights from the big data explosion of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The purpose of Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise architecture is in reality one of the most powerful management approaches that can be used by an organisation. It is not intended to be used (only) at a solution or project level but for the big decisions that an organisation’s leadership team have to make.

Quote for the day:

"Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world." --Joel Barker

September 04, 2012

Touch Targets for Application Design
In this video, in addition to general guidelines, Luke also showcase a before and after design that converts a keyboard and mouse application to a touch-optimized interface by rethinking navigation, input controls, and more.

10 Things You Didn’t Know About Yelp
Next to Google, there’s probably no more important site for small businesses than Yelp. Yet perhaps no other site is as poorly understood. For instance, is it a good idea to encourage your customers to give you good reviews on the site? Does Yelp pay for reviews? How do you go about countering bad reviews?

Is the Era of Innovation Over?
The conclusions that Dr. Brander comes to are less than comforting (if you agree with his view of innovation); his research found the pace of innovation to be slowing dramatically in four key areas: agriculture, energy, transportation, and health care.

Leaders in Beta: Testing What Works
Due to the complex challenges we face in the world right now, leaders would benefit tremendously by embracing a ‘beta mindset’ by not only having a clear, long-term vision of where they want to go, but also being able to adapt quickly, by continually collaborating with those that are affected by their leadership.

New Microsoft agreement: No class action suits for you
Microsoft has notified users of changes to its Services Agreement. Effective October 19, users waive their rights to class action lawsuits - among other fun clarifications.

Analyzing Unstructured Content
UIMA document provides an overview of how to develop simple and aggregated analysis engines. I found this document gripping (which is not a term you normally associate with technical documents). It not only explains the conceptual thinking behind UIMA, but also triggers several ideas and thoughts for further reading.

Can 4K ever become a household technology?
Bizarrely, 4K works better the closer you sit. Even on Sony's 84-inch monster. Sony group manager Paul Colley told us that to get the best viewing experience, they recommend a seating distance of 1.5 metres for 4K video, 3 metres for HD and 6 metres for SD.

10 Steps to Effective Data Governance for SMBs
Data Governance is an emerging business priority. In a recent survey sponsored by IBM, two-thirds of all companies are implementing or planning to implement a data governance program in the next 18 months. Seventy percent see data governance growing in importance in the next three to five years.

Malicious malware targets journalists, free press organizations
An opportunistic assailant attempted to deceive Committee to Protect Journalists and load malicious malware onto a computer belonging to the the organization's director.

Bringing Google+ to work
Whether you’re across the street or across the world, you can hold face-to-face meetings, share updates with colleagues and friends and work on a presentation together in real time. Like Google Apps, we think Google+ can help colleagues collaborate more easily and get things done—and get to know each other along the way.

From MongoDB to Riak at Shareaholic
Robby Grossman talked at Boston Riak meetup about Shareaholic’s migration from MongoDB to Riak and their requirements and evaluation of top contenders: HBase, Cassandra, Riak.

Quote for the day:

"The person who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the one who will win." -- Roger Bannister

September 03, 2012

The Toolbox
A collection of the best time-saving apps, tools, and widgets from around the web

5 Ways to Improve Your Company's Team Presentation Skills
Your staff may be individually brilliant. But unless they're conscious of communicating as a team, you won't achieve the impact you're hoping for. And that means prospects, customers, clients and constituents are going to be let down.

Uninterrupted DBMS operation — an almost-achievable goal
There are no iron-clad assurances of zero downtime; if nothing else, you could crash your whole system yourself via some kind of application bug. Even so, it’s a worthy ideal, and near-zero downtime is a practical goal.

Doing more with nbsp
The gaps are intended to provide a separation between the weekly, quarterly and semi-annual data. Providing a blank for the gap values works if there is only one. But putting two blank values, they get treated as one category value, resulting in one gap.

12 (Really) Controversial Programming Opinions
Code that does not talk directly to the CPU and the OS, but is instead run by some other program that does talk directly to the CPU and the OS, is not a program; it's a script.

The future of Microsoft .Net
With Windows 8, Windows RT, .NET Framework 4.5, and Windows Azure, Microsoft has reached its latest existential moment. Can Microsoft make another big platform leap? Yes, but the odds are long. So much of Microsoft’s future growth and profitability is tied to the success of this platform, and the obstacles to success with Windows 8 and WinRT, and to some degree Windows Azure, are great. This is a shift that Microsoft must get right or face serious constraints on its growth in future year

The Unstructured Information Management Architecture
The Apache UIMA framework is an Apache licensed, open source implementation of the UIMA Architecture, and provides a run-time environment in which developers can plug in and run their UIMA component implementations and with which they can build and deploy UIM applications. Here is a 54 page PDF with overview of UIMA.

Running R on Hadoop: Why MapReduce? Why R?

If you find a good way to put together two things that excel at what they are doing, you’ll most probably get a gold nugget. That’s what I feel when thinking about integrating R and Hadoop.

On Lack Of IT Readiness – And Innovators Dilemma. VMware Delivers A Sad Reality
The seeming lack of innovation amongst VMware’s customers is important since it gets to the very heart of corporate IT’s ability (or lack thereof) to deliver what the business, and individual users within the business, need.

10 signs that you aren't cut out for IT
For anyone considering getting into the world of IT, or for those considering getting out of IT… how do you know? How do you know whether you are really cut out for the career that chews up and spits out its young? Well, I have a handy list of signs that maybe IT isn’t the best fit for you.

Quote for the day:

"In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield." -- Warren Buffett

September 02, 2012

Using Cloud Collaboration and Sharing Tools to Start Your Entrepreneurial Project
Your next business needs to progress from being an idea in your head to a plan and on through several other stages even before the nominal Day 0. For many would-be founders, a new class of cloud service can provide early momentum for starting a new business, turning a hobby into a source of income or forming a “skill team” that fills an unmet niche in your locale.

A New Series: The Future of Robotics, The Next 20 Years
From deep sea and space exploration, processing waste, helping the police to helping the elderly and handicapped live better, longer lives, medical surgery that can do what a human can’t do, cleaning our homes, smart homes, cars and cities, robotics will begin to make its way into our lives in earnest.

Cloud computing: the backlash starts
This had to happen sometime - Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has come out against cloud computing. Commentators haven't been universally sympathetic - here's a report which clearly laments his view - but you can't help but wonder how much of our technology and information we're placing in the hands of other people

Efficient Map Operations for Arrays in C#
This article compares the performance of various techniques for implementing a map function for transforming arrays and introduces a novel high-performance implementation of map that uses expression tree rewriting.

Why corporate strategy needs to change with Cloud?
Cloud computing changes everything, including corporate strategy as a practice. I have listed five reasons why, although I’m sure there are many more. Long story short: Corporate strategists need to get out of their 20th century mindset and into the 21st century.

Sometimes the Weakest Excuse can topple the Strongest Business Case
... the purpose of this blog is to (1) make you more aware of LAME excuses so that you recognize them for what they are and do not let them prevent forward movement, and (2) to remind you to use the entire assortment of tools in your arsenal as an information professional ...

Hearing what isn’t said
Drucker said, “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”

Servers Too Hot? Intel Recommends a Luxurious Oil Bath
That’s a technique that Intel has been testing out over the past year, running servers in little oil-filled boxes built by an Austin, Texas, company called Green Revolution Cooling. As Gigaom reported on Friday, it turns out that once you take out the PC’s fans and seal up the hard drives, oil-cooling a server works out pretty well.

Quote for the day:

"Spectacular achievements are always preceded by unspectacular preparation." -- Roger Staubach