Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

October 18, 2012

Do’s & Don’ts of Leadership
The truth is – leadership is more of an art than science. You won’t get any better by cutting corners. Even if you know the Do’s and Don’ts, you still need to find the guiding line where you should stop and not crossover. And this, takes years of repeated practicing to hone your skills.

…more than a company, it’s a way of life
Marketing, while primarily intended for an external audience – or so one would initially think – is just as much for those internal resources representing the brand, every day. Because, if you don’t have internal buy-in, what do you have?

Top Five Personality Traits Employers Hire Most
Universum, the Stockholm-based employer branding firm that annually surveys over 400,000 students and professionals worldwide on jobs-related issues, has culled their data to the top five personality traits employers are looking for in job candidates in 2012.

5 Ideas to Reboot Your Leadership Drive
it is the fact that these individuals took the time to re-examine the role of a leader as they always envisioned it and compared it to the leader they’ve become, that drives them to the next level. The clear view to their dissonant behaviors and their ideal leader-self propels the drive to improve.

5 key forces driving open source today
The following five trends are key drivers of today's open source communities and projects. From governance to emerging revenue models, they paint a picture of an industry evolving to see the value of the freedoms at the heart of the open source movement.

Nissan to add robot driving, digitize link between steering wheel and tires
Nissan said Wednesday its new technology will be the world's first to do away the mechanical connection between steering and control of vehicles, replacing it with an electronic one. As drivers spin and twist their steering wheels in the new cars, information will be sent digitally to processors and motors that control the wheels on the ground.

Virtually Real
The most important and biggest step is to virtualise business critical applications, which will drive the real business benefits for any organisation. Here are some recommendations that organisations can follow to virtualise business-critical applications with confidence:

Understanding the parallelism of a Storm topology
In this article Michael G. Noll want to share his own understanding of the parallelism of a Storm topology after reading the documentation and writing some first prototype code. More specifically, he describes the relationships of worker processes, executors (threads) and tasks, and how you can configure them according to your needs.

Data profiling vs data quality assessment - resolving the confusion
A lot of people use data profiling as the start and end point for their data quality assessment and as a result they lack an ability to determine whether the profiling results are valued in a balanced and correct way, significant to the business and reflect the true extent of a particular issue

Don't put all your eggs in one cloud
What’s the best way to ensure maximum performance of hosted apps? Depend on multiple cloud hosting services that have distinct regional strengths, Cedexis co-founder and general manager Julien Coulon told SoundView CEO and GigaOM Pro analyst Kris Tuttle during a panel on day two of GigaOM’s Structure:Europe conference in Amsterdam

Bridging the Gap in Big Data, Cloud and Real-Time Data Integration
Today’s businesses cannot stand still when it comes to data. Market success now depends on speed, volume, complexity, and keeping pace with the latest data integration breakthroughs. Are you up to speed on big data, cloud integration, real-time analytics, and continuous availability solutions? Attend this Webcast to learn more about complete and modern solutions for solving these challenges.

Quotes for te day:

"Leadership is action, not position." -- Donald H. McGannon

"Always acknowledge a fault. It throws those in authority off their guard and gives you an opportunity to commit more" -- M. Twain

October 17, 2012

Agile Bug Management: Not an Oxymoron
Carrying bug debt is unhealthy and sometimes, even destructive. We should fix bugs, not track them. A feature isn't done until the bugs are fixed. Quality is part of the overall cost. Bugs are prioritized against new features. A bug needs to be more important than the next new feature.

Q&A: Moving Between Cloud Technologies
Many organizations start with private clouds, then move to a public cloud (or adopt a hybrid mix). That move can be filled with risks, especially regarding security -- and once you have a public/hybrid cloud in place, what new skills does IT need to manage it? Learn about the problems and best practices from moving between cloud models, from Andrew Hay, chief evangelist at CloudPassage;

WatchDox for SharePoint Enables Secure Sharing of Office, PDF Documents
WatchDox, a provider of secure access, file sync, and collaboration solutions, has released WatchDox for SharePoint, an integrated solution that securely enables SharePoint libraries to be both mobile and collaborative across company boundaries.

Getting Real with MDM
Since the first survey from The Information Difference in 2008, much has changed in master data management, both in technology and in implementation expertise and experience. In particular, MDM has graduated from a novel innovative technology to become relatively mature and accepted. It is increasingly being adopted by multinational organizations to tackle their data inconsistency nightmares and deliver reliable, trusted business information.

NASSCOM BPO Summit 2012 Day2: Opening Keynote
Here is the recorded video of Steve Tower's Key Note address outlining the Outside In: The power of putting customers at the center of your business.

When to Fire a Top Performer Who Hurts Your Company Culture
Star performers should be let go if they become a "cultural vampire," Eric Sinoway writes. Such workers collect power, influence and followers, and soon "there's a small army of vampires and zombies attacking the stars, high potentials and leaders who are doing the right thing," Sinoway writes.

Salesforce.com chief scientist on how and why the cloud is here to stay
The best way I can respond to that question [about whether cloud computing is for real] is, ‘Do my children no any different?’” said Salesforce.com Chief Scientist JP Rangaswami during a morning session at our Structure: Europe conference on Wednesday.

Breaking into a New Company
All of a sudden you don't have any friends, you're not sure what you're supposed to do, and it's hard to find the bathroom. Adding to the pressure is the unspoken fact that the clock is ticking: Your new colleagues may give you a grace period, but you know that they are making judgments about whether or not you'll be a good fit, starting on day one.

5 Habits of Highly Effective Cloud Architects
In a new post, Chris Bruzzi and Nick Hamm, both with Appirio, a cloud services provider, share their experiences in cloud application development. They point to the five changes in mindset that needs to take place as application development and deployment evolves to the cloud world.

The Right Way to be Wrong
Dan Rockwell through Leadership Freak: Too many mistakes and you lose credibility. Too few mistakes and you’re dead in the water, you can’t lead. 5 ways to get good at mistake making

Quote for the day:

"You get the best efforts from others not by lighting a fire beneath them, but by building a fire within." -- Bob Nelson

October 16, 2012

Data warehousing architecture takes logical turn in big data era
Now, though, the expectations have shifted: Instead of one technology replacing another, co-existence between the EDW, standalone analytical databases and big data systems such as Hadoop clusters and NoSQL databases is likely to be the name of the data warehousing architecture game going forward.

EU regulators find legal problems in Google privacy policy
European data and privacy regulators have discovered flaws in the revised and consolidated Google privacy policy, months after launching an investigation into the search giant's privacy rules.

Agile Careers: Beauty
A beautiful circuit design has value for its own sake, and beautiful code can more easily be comprehended and extended to increase its value. It’s not always that business imperative that leads you in the “right” direction: what are the code formatting rules that support your corporate ROI? But focusing on beauty for its own sake may have payoff — at least in casuistic value, certainly in psychological value, and perhaps in economic value.

Batman versus the Evil Definitions
It can be a daunting task to define a simple term, such as “Customer,” but it could be a lot easier (and maybe just as effective) to instead define what these terms do. So can we define something in terms of what that something does, instead of what something “is”?

Ransomware resurrects the SOPA specter
Enterprising virus developers have piggybacked on the fear that copyright infringement and court cases produce for the general public -- using the recognizable SOPA branding to lure victims into parting with their hard-earned cash.

Use a USB key to log in to your PC
If security is a concern and you're looking for easier ways to secure your PC, Rohos is a great option. It's missing an important feature, though: The ability to automatically lock the PC when you remove the USB key.

Leadership Caffeine-Is it Time to Re-examine the Leader You’ve Become?
Growth like every other process of change starts with the recognition that you own the problem and control the solution. Taking time to reflect and re-examine your role and performance as a leader offers nothing but growth opportunities for yourself and for those who look to you to lead.

The problem with perfectionism
Perfectionism can be destructive in the business world because leaders who exhibit this trait might irritate their employees or slow down important tasks. "Perfection is often the opposite of speed," Jim Estill of CanRock Venture said. "But being slow is often worse than not being perfect."

Lightning cable's authentication chip found to offer "just enough" security
In a teardown of Apple's new Lightning cable, semiconductor and electronic systems analysis firm Chipworks found an unpublished Texas Instruments chip that is likely to include a security feature, which Apple may be leveraging to stop third-party accessory makers from building unauthorized products.

Incompatible IT systems blamed for bank sale collapse
The Spanish bank pulled out, largely "because of problems over integrating the two banks' IT systems", The BBC reports. The Telegraph has a teeny bit more detail, reporting a "series of IT problems that have resulted from a lack of compatibility between RBS accounts and the Santander IT systems".

The Process Stages of Data Governance
The primary business processes that enable data governance and stewardship, ... There are over twenty distinct processes segmented into four core process stages – all of which are iterative and likely encompass many parallel activities depending on the stage of maturity you find yourself:

Quote for the day:

"You can kill a man but you can't kill an idea." -- Medgar Evers

October 15, 2012

US Navy Updates it's Enterprise Architecture Framework to 4.0
Like with all other US government agencies they are federally mandated to have enterprise architecture (EA) established to support their IT strategies and to capitalize on their vast technological assets and make sound decisions about investments in new technology.

Moore's Law: The rule that really matters in tech
Moore's Law has long passed being mere prognostication. It's the marching order for a vast, well-funded industry with a record of overcoming naysayers' doubts. Researchers keep finding ways to maintain a tradition that two generations ago would have been science fiction: That computers will continue to get smaller even as they get more powerful.

How is complexity being killed? - Forth question in Stress-testing your Enterprise Architecture
It's time for the forth of seven questions in stress testing your enterprise architecture: How is complexity being killed? First of all, let's look into which types of complexity we are facing. I can come up with at least three, there may of course be more, but this is enough for this discussion

SoftBank buying 70% stake in Sprint
Of the purchase price, $12.1 billion will be used to purchase existing Sprint stock at $7.30 per share. The remaining $8 billion will go toward the purchase of new shares at $5.25 each. The companies said they expect the deal to close in mid-2013.

Synology DiskStation DS213air: First Take
If network cabling is impractical, Synology's Wi-Fi-equipped DS213air may prove useful. Aside from its wireless capability, it's a capable 2-bay NAS with excellent management software.

India agency petitions for monitoring system
The Times of India reported Monday that a formal request has been sent from the NIA to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) requesting permission to install the system once it is fully functional. The NIA is the agency set up in the aftermath of the deadly Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008.

Top 10 enterprise architecture trends, identified by Forrester
Forrester's Gene Leganza queried his compatriots at Forrester Research, compiled a list of the hottest trends enterprise architects and IT managers need to watch over the next two to three years. Forrester identified 15 trends; here are the top 10 trends on the list:

Don't Sabotage Yourself
A more recent set of experiments conducted by psychologist Sean McCrea at the University of Konstanz in Germany showed that people who were encouraged to make excuses for their poor performance — blaming poor performance on loud noises, for example — maintained high self-esteem, but were also less motivated to improve.

IT Spending in India to reach $71.5 billion next year
Speaking at the Gartner Symposium in Goa, Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president and global head of research at Gartner, said, “India, like other emerging markets, continues exercising strong momentum despite inflationary pressures and appreciation of local currencies, which are expected in rising economies.“

Raspberry Model B now ships with 512MB of RAM
If you have an outstanding order with either distributor, you will receive the upgraded device in place of the 256MB version you ordered. Units should start arriving in customers’ hands today, and a firmware upgrade will be made available in the next couple of days to enable access to the additional memory.

Quotes for the day:

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." -- Mark Twain

"When visibility is poor, turn on your car lights. Not to see, but to be seen." -- Paul Thomas

October 14, 2012

30 big data project takeaways
Technology executives are hopping on the big data bandwagon at a rapid clip as they run Hadoop pilots, eye internal information streams and struggle to find talent. Here's a look at 30 big data takeaways over the last two weeks via a conference at Temple University as well as ZDNet's TechLines roundtable discussion last week.

Using the new .NET CLR without recompiling
One of the lesser known capabilities of the new CLR is in-process side-by-side execution. This allows applications that were built on an older version of .NET (before 4.0) to use the new features of the updated CLR without even having to recompile your code!

Cisco, Netapp Announce Pre-Configured Platform for SMBs
ExpressPod integrates Cisco UCS (Unified Computing System) C-Series servers, NetApp FAS2220 or FAS2240 (Fabric-Attached Storage) arrays, and Cisco Nexus 3048 switches with infrastructure management. ExpressPod supports an open ecosystem of management and hypervisors.

Enterprise IT Architecture: Goals, Trends and Perspectives
The Zachman framework is a particularly helpful framework to employ; it’s a formal and highly structured way of viewing and defining enterprise architecture. The Zachman framework is possibly the best such business architecture framework for analysis of an enterprise IT strategy as it identifies individual components in a strategy as they relate to processes, organizational structure and key stakeholders.

Employee Recognition: 5 Keys from Taj Hotels Resorts
Many best practices for recognition can be gleaned from a company that many in the west are unfamiliar with, Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces, which operates 93 luxury hotels across India and 16 other hotels in other parts of the world.

Apple Maps Accidentally Reveals Highly Sensitive Taiwanese Radar Installation
Taiwanese defense officials will ask Apple to blur satellite imagery of a previously unknown radar facility meant to provide early warning in case of a missile attack from mainland China, after the installation was accidentally outted on Apple's new Maps app.

Creative Direction - 8 Ideas for When Creativity Is Too Easy or Hard - Mike Brown
If the two creative extremes Salvador Dali offered aren’t very good answers, what can you do to move your creative reality somewhere in between? You want to have strategies to turn both creative extremes into challenging, workable creative successes. Here are four strategies for each creative extreme.

CIO Succession Plans Lacking, Study Finds
IT pros are accustomed to handling unexpected crises, such as when hardware fails or a cloud service has an outage. But it seems many IT leaders haven't considered what will happen if they're suddenly unable to work.

Scientists Build a Digital Camera That Can Be Absorbed by the Body
What if there were a disposable digital camera that you could eat after using? Sounds bizarre, but it already exists. Scientists in the US are working on uber-thin electronics that can be dissolved inside the human body once their job is done.

Google rolls out major Street View upgrade
Street View coverage has been broadened in 11 countries, including the U.S., Sweden, the U.K., Italy and Singapore, and special collections have been launched for South Africa, Japan, Spain, France, Brazil, Mexico and other countries.

Quotes for the day:

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." -- John Cage

"Leadership has a harder job to do than just choose sides. It must bring sides together." -- Jesse Jackson

October 13, 2012

Cisco Survey: Execs Reluctantly Embracing BYOD
Corporate executives continue to be uneasy about the mobile computing and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trends, but understand that the momentum will only grow and that companies must ensure that the right policies are in place to protect sensitive data in a mobile world, according to Cisco Systems.

CIOs and CSOs Have a Costly Disconnect
"Much of this disconnect falls at the feet of the IT security profession," Street says. "It is IT security that, too often, is failing the business. We don't communicate risk well enough, and why the risk is worth mitigating."

Business architecture takes the fore in application portfolio analysis
For enterprise architects looking to transform complex legacy software, application portfolio analysis can be the key to aligning business investments with core capabilities. After all, companies need to know which applications they have before they can decide which ones to keep, add or abandon.

SOA governance standard goes global
The Open Group announced that its SOA Governance Framework is now an international standard, having passed its six-month ratification vote within the International Standards Organization (ISO) and the International Electrotechical Commission(IEC).

Writing Automated Acceptance Tests with Spec Flow
Gherkin is a domain specific language that lets us describe how our applications should behave without having to explain implementation details. Most of the above specification is free-text; there are only a few Gherkin specific keywords: Feature, Scenario, Given, When, And and Then. Everything else is free-text and is practically our documentation of how the feature is used.

Spider Silk Could Weave Biodegradable Computer Chips
Many people have heard that spider silk is a sort of supermaterial: stronger than steel, tougher than Kevlar, and yet incredibly malleable and flexible. But the silk has other properties that make it ideal for use in electronic devices. Light can travel through a silk strand as easily as it does through a fiber optic cable.

Why The Cloud Hasn't Solved The Office Paperwork Problem
Amazon now sells more eBooks than print, the DMV offers vehicle registration online and most airlines encourage online flight check-ins. Yet, these new sensations have not done away with paper alternatives.

SAS Extends Analytics Support for Unstructured Data
At its Premier Business Leadership Series here, SAS unveiled an upgraded version of its High Performance Analytic Server that adds support for Hadoop and the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).

Force-sensing Touchpad to Reach Ultrabooks Next Year
Synaptics gave the forcepad to more than two dozen academic research groups, which were challenged to come up with novel uses for the device. It's like a touchpad, but in addition to the usual swiping gestures it can sense how much pressure is being applied, adding another dimension for control.

Quote for the day:

"Whenever an individual or a business decides that success has been attained, progress stops." -- Thomas J. Watson

October 12, 2012

Research: Developer perspectives on IT failure
The only solution lies in IT and the business collaborating and communicating more effectively. When both sides work together closely, many problems evaporate; the failures we so often see are a symptom of communications breakdowns between these groups.

CIOs more cautious on IT budgets, plan more outsourcing: survey
Chief information officers are not expecting any robust increases in IT spending over the coming year, and are starting to ramp up more outsourcing initiatives. More IT work will not be going to India, but to another Asian nation.

Sustaining a Winning Culture
Sustaining a winning culture involves engaging with your culture champions, and acknowledging their contributions. You will also notice that this has been widely recognised as a key performance motivator in younger workers, or Gen Y, as they are sometimes called.

Nokia looks to improve solar charging performance
The charging mat uses a thin-film photovoltaic panel, weighs 93 grams and has a 3 meter long cable to connect to the phone via Nokia's standard 2 millimeter plug.

Amazon Adds Number Of Services To GovCloud
The new AWS GovCloud services include Amazon EC2 Cluster Compute instances, Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) and Amazon CloudWatch alarms.

New Wireless EEG System for Mobile Brain Wave Monitoring (video)
Because it can be applied by the user without assistance from a highly trained professional, coupled with the fact that it can be used outside the clinic, the device may open new doors for using EEG to study the brain in a variety of situations and environments.

Paradigm Shift in the CIO's Role
Contemporary CIOs stake a much broader and imperative role in the business, driving business transformation, innovating for competitive advantage and acting as key strategic partners to the CEO and formulating goals to the wider organization as a whole.

Top 10 Benefits Of Crowd funding
The amount of money raised by crowdfunding platforms during 2012 is expected to reach $2.8 billion, up 91% since 2011. Here are 10 great benefits that crowdfunding offers an entrepreneur.

The Product is the Byproduct
A great product is closer to an accident. It's the byproduct of the environment you build at your company. This environment may actually be harder to build than the product itself, but you'll be left with a better everything by the end of it.

Quote for the day:

"Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success;leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall." --Covey

October 11, 2012

Ballmer: Microsoft's a 'devices and services' company now
"It truly is a new era at Microsoft," he says in his annual letter to shareholders, and that means the company is focused on selling hardware augmented by cloud services. "This is a significant shift, both in what we do and how we see ourselves as a devices and services company," Ballmer says in his letter.

SIM: CIOs Feeling Cost Pressure
SIM’s just released survey, which annually reaches out to more than 3,500 CIOs and IT executives at member organizations, had historically placed business and IT alignment at the top of CIO concerns. This year finds that CIOs are facing the same cost-saving pressures as other parts of the organization, says Jerry Luftman, SIM VP, lead researcher for the report and executive director, Global Institute for IT Management.

VMware Tightens Management Infrastructures
VMware is on course to assemble an impervious management infrastructure that will complement its software-defined datacenter plans and solidify its leadership position as a purveyor of private and hybrid clouds. Building on its recently announced VMware vCloud Suite, the company is now focusing on customer service provisioning, cloud operation management and cloud business management.

Box Thinks Outside the Box on Cloud Security, Compliance
On the compliance side, it has released a new reporting API that will enable third-party business intelligence partners, such as GoodData, to create dashboards that will let administrators detect unusual activity such as an individual downloading an excessive number of files.

Effective Application Security Risk Management: From Policy to Standards
This webcast will focus on the individuals who are tasked with writing and/or managing security policies. The goal of this webcast is to explain the value and process of writing application security policies with a particular focus on how to create policies that are useful and actionable for your software development teams.

Microsoft Office coming to Android and Apple devices in early 2013
A Microsoft executive let slip in the Czech Republic that the long-rumored Microsoft Office for Android smartphones and tablets and Apple iPad and iPhones will be arriving in early 2013. Microsoft now denies that their executive was speaking accurately.

DBS, Microsoft partner to boost customer service
DBS Bank has deployed five Microsoft PixelSense table-top multitouch systems in one of its branches here, which it believes will bring better customer interaction and efficiency. ... DBS also chose the system for its object recognition capabilities, he said. The PixelSense technology allows the screen to detect up to 256 unique "symbols", which would then retrieve relevant information associated with each symbol.

Data Warehouse Construction: The Real Life
While the significant similarity can be exploited to increase the constructional productivity, the huge amount of programs converts the data warehouse construction to a real challenge. It is because in addition to the troublesome programming (scripting, coding, "modeling," etc.), all of these programs have to be designed, specified, tested, documented and maintained as well. Such a huge amount of work cannot be accomplished by a single person within a short period.

BMW’s cold call: It shifts computing to Iceland
German car and motorcycle stalwart BMW is transferring crash simulations and other high performance computing to Iceland, where the country’s 100 percent renewable electricity and year round “free” chilling will slash carbon emissions and costs.

Indian IT to create new industry around Big Data
Analytics is becoming important globally thanks to the explosion of data. Corporates have their internal data, but increasingly, they now have to deal with related external data, coming from social media, blogs, image and video sites, sensors and more.

Quote for the day:

"There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure." -- Colin L. Powell

October 10, 2012

Breaking Through Development Project Barriers
Barriers, real or imagined, are constructed and prevent progress toward solving problems. ... You can't always break down the barriers around you. But you can learn to recognize them and ask questions. The "5 Whys"technique can help get to the root cause, allowing you to solve the underlying problem(s) that created the barrier in the first place.

Analyst: Microsoft to price Surface RT tablet at $400 to $500
"With a launch set for later this month, speculation has intensified, with some sources stating a price less than $399 for the RT version. Let's get to a more educated estimate of the BOM cost and pricing for the Surface RT and Pro."

Google upgrades Search Appliance for enterprises
Google Search Appliance 7.0 was unveiled today and will be available Oct. 16 for sale or for customers to download. The new version would help employees in large enterprises find stored information whether they're using a desktop PC, a tablet or a smartphone.

Why Doesn’t Governance Lead to Data Freedom?
The business needs speed and agility and wants to get the job done. It does not want to be hampered by process, development timelines, and certainly does not want to hear “no.” Data governance needs to evolve to develop policies that are not just about what you can’t do, but what you can do.

Complex and non-transparent Oracle licensing costing firms millions
“We are seeing an increasing number of global customers failing to remain compliant with Oracle’s licensing schemes amid growing virtualisation and this is largely because of Oracle’s non-transparent and complicated licensing policy,” said Judica Krikke, solicitor at European law firm Stibbe, at the VMworld Europe 2012 event in Barcelona.

5 Leadership Approaches for Knowing, Being and Doing
Do my leadership practices include aligning people toward common goals, enlisting both their heads and their hearts, and then empowering them to act? If not, in what areas do I need to do better?

PC passwords exposed by flaw in Apple-owned fingerprint software
A security flaw in fingerprint reading software, now owned by Apple, which has the potential to leave millions of Windows PC users' passwords exposed, has been independently verified by security researchers.

Softbank to launch 110Mbps mobile router next week
The soap-bar size modem from Huawei provide download speeds of up to 110Mbps on its LTE network and can provide a Wi-Fi connection to up to 10 devices at the same time. It has a 3,000mAh battery and can also be used as a network drive via memory cards plugged into its microSD slot, which supports cards up to 64GB in size.

Procuring IT from startups offers benefits, but beware risks
Purchasing IT from startup vendors, instead of bigger and established companies, can allow access to benefits such as more innovative technologies and greater negotiating leverage. However, customers must note and prepare for risks such as the potential issues in scalability and support.

The Internet2 experiment goes global
The takeaway from keynote speakers Sam Pitroda and John Sexton is that we need global resources to solve local problems. Advanced networking infrastructure spreads intellectual capital and offers opportunities to improve quality of life;

Quote for the day:

"No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched." -- George Jean Nathan

October 09, 2012

What exactly is a "post-PC device" anyway?
Technologists, and I include myself in this, sometimes struggle to think outside of what they themselves use and need in a separate way to what a "normal" human being needs. As a result, most technologists tend to think of tablets as a "PC Plus" - i.e. a tablet that because it runs Windows you can do more with.

Decision time: Automated data integration tools versus manual coding
Writing SQL integration scripts can be straightforward and seemingly inexpensive -- but data integration might be one case where handmade is no longer best, Sherman says in this interview with SearchDataManagement.com

Creative firms are variance- centric
Productivity orientation brings with it predictability, certainty and hence complacency, which may not be a good recipe when the change outside is rapid. On the other hand, variance- centric firms deliberately infuse outliers, experimentation and hence learning and innovation, quintessential elements to cope with rapid change.

Another Week Another In-Memory Big Data Analytics Platform
ScaleOut software is the new entrant to provide an in-memory powered data analytics platform that integrates map/reduce functionality enabling organizations to achieve near real-time data analytics.

World Can Be Your Oyster
For majority of us who are well into our 30’s and 40’s, this implies significant effort in re-training and re-skilling. It requires changing our mind-sets too, as many of us have resisted being hands-on with technology as we have moved up the ladder.

Clas Neumann: Customers Inspire Innovation
The Indian development centre of SAP located in Bangalore has contributed about 20-25 per cent to HANA development, says Clas Neumann, Senior Vice President, Global Head, SAP Labs. In a conversation with Manu Sharma, he discusses some of the innovations in the enterprise apps space and how IT managers are leveraging them

Can MySql Be Used For BigData With TokuDB?
TokuDB in its recent release scales MySql and MariaDB from Giga Bytes to Tera Bytes while improving overall performance for Flash drives. This helps many applications which run on MySql and MariaDB databases boost their performance.

Will the Future be Written Entirely in Javascript?
No popular language may be as maligned as JavaScript. But its migration to the server side opens the possibility it may become all-pervasive.

BYOD Is Not About Devices
It is about providing secure access to applications and data from any device, anywhere. That is, BYOD is about device agnostic access. The solutions to BYOD are solutions to providing mobility for a number of enterprise scenarios, BYOD included.

Cloud ROI: Of the people, by the people, for the people
The true cost of cloud is greater than many realize. While the cloud removes the burden of paying up to 10 times the amount for self-hosted applications, it is a mistake to think that there are no costs beyond the purchase of licenses and consulting services. Additional factors influence the true cost of cloud investment, including ongoing innovation, governance and adoption.

Quote for the day:

"The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow." -- Rupert Murdoch