Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

June 19, 2013

Java Garbage Collection Distilled
Garbage collection algorithms are often optimized with the expectation that most objects live for a very short period of time, while relatively few live for very long. In most applications, objects that live for a significant period of time tend to constitute a very small percentage of objects allocated over time. In garbage collection theory this observed behavior is often know as “infant mortality” or the “weak generational hypothesis”.

Intel bets on heterogeneous future for supercomputing
"We believe the right answer is to use the best of what heterogeneity provides, which is the performance per energy spent and the customisation benefit," said Dr Rajeeb Hazra, Intel's VP of datacenter and connected systems group and general manager of the technical computing group. One drawback of the heterogeneous computing is the added complexity of writing programs that can run on different instruction set architectures.

What Are You Using?
You’ll find here the answers the best and brightest developers in web development gave to the four questions, which include 'Which editor or IDE do you use?' and 'What software can you not live without on a daily basis?'. Hopefully you will discover some tools that could make your development much easier. You’ll definitely find common themes (Sublime) and a few nuggets that are new.

Our Backbone Stack
Backbone is a base to build on top of. It gives you a framework for separating your data and your presentation into models and views, but there is a lot that it doesn't give you. It's up to you to figure out what else your unique app needs, and how much of that you'll get from open-source libraries or decide to write yourselves. Here is how backbone.js stacks up at coursera

Twelve essential questions to help improve your project's AIM statement
When teams are unable to focus on the real issue, they lose valuable problem solving time, and become discouraged about the value of QI. Team members become disengaged from the process since they seem to be going in circles without making any progress. Below are twelve questions to facilitate the process of developing AIM statements that are clear, specific, and focused.

Data De-identification Dilemma
In today’s context, a vast amount of personal information is becoming available from various public and private sources all around the world, which include public records like, telephone directories, property records, voters register and even the social networking sites. The chances of using these data to link against de-identified data and there by being able to re-identify the individual is high.

Following Dell acquisitions, users find platform integration enticing
"For the most part, the things they said they would deliver in the unified system have made it in there," Bumgardner continued. "I know there's talk of them providing more standardization of product lines. But when we talked to them two years ago, it was a five- or six-year timeline, so I'm surprised some of that already made it in."

ECRI: 10 ways to cut health IT risks
Health IT is on nearly every healthcare organization’s radar screen. And it will continue to be for the next few years as organizations move to electronic health records," Cindy Wallace, senior risk management analyst, said in a news release. "We recognize that bringing these systems online is a massive team effort. Risk management input is essential."

Yes, you really can make complex webapps responsive
Information consumption is the focus for the designers of these websites. Visitors need to be able to digest content with low friction on any device they own. While responsive techniques are popular for brochure type sites, the question remains; How achievable are they for interaction rich web apps?

Don't let your Governance program derail
The success of your governance program may be jeopardized by many factors, including complexity of the initiative, lack of executive support and / or internal resources, organizational culuture, data integrity issues, etc. Those issues can be addressed with careful planning and recruitment efforts, but for your efforts to have the most impact they must be considered within the context of yur organizational environment.

Quote for the day:

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” -- Winston Churchill

June 18, 2013

How To Analyze Performance, Capacity with Foglight
With Dell acquiring Quest, Quest Foglight and vKernel vOPS are now all Dell products. With these changes, all products have been rebranded with the Foglight for Virtualization name and is available in three editions; Free, Standard and Enterprise. The Free Edition is based on the same virtual appliance as the Standard Edition and allows you try the Standard version (with a single click) as you need more advanced functionality with no loss of historical performance statistics.

Samsung mass produces 1.4GBps PCIe flash cards for notebooks
"This allows the drive to read 500GB of data or 100 HD movies as large as 5GB in only six minutes, or 10 HD movies at 5GB in 36 seconds," the company claimed in a news release. "That is approximately seven times faster than a hard disk drive (which would need over 40 minutes for the same task), and more than 2.5 times faster than the fastest SATA SSD."

Making OUTER and CROSS APPLY work for you
This article will explain OUTER and CROSS APPLY and show you how to use them by means of sample code. OUTER and CROSS APPLY are unique to SQL Server so this article is intended for anybody using SQL in a SQL Server environment. It will also cover many examples of where you can use OUTER and CROSS APPLY and their pro's and con's.

NIST Cloud Computing - Security Reference Architecture
The purpose of this document is to define a NIST Cloud Computing Security Reference Architecture (NCC-SRA) – a framework that: identifies a core set of Security Componentsthat can be implemented in a Cloud Ecosystem to secure the environment, the operations, and the data migrated to the cloud; provides, for each Cloud Actor, the core set of Security Componentsthat fall under their responsibilities depending on the deployment and service models; ...

Microsoft Building Up Hyper-V Management Support for Linux and Unix Servers
The improvements that Microsoft is bringing with the new Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2 also apply to managing Linux and Unix systems. Examples offered by Kelley included faster live migrations and network virtualization benefits. He also described dynamic memory support, the ability to dynamically resize VHDs and VHDXs, a new two-dimensional synthetic video driver and the ability to use replicas of Linux-based virtual machines (VMs) for disaster recovery.

Prism doesn't have CIOs in a panic -- yet
Many enterprises may be more concerned about industrial espionage than government spy agencies cracking their communications. But Prism should nonetheless serve as a clear wake-up call to CIOs and other IT executives, said Nick Selby, CEO of StreetCred Software and a risk management consultant who advises large organizations on industrial espionage and data breaches.

How to Comply with Security Standards for Health Care Applications
This article demonstrates how Visual Guard has been able to help meet the strict criteria of health regulations in the United States. It will look at why two major health care actors have integrated Visual Guard into their applications. Visual Guard combines authentication, permissions and auditing features in the same tool. A number of Visual Guard clients are public and private health care actors.

Chris Matts on BDD, Feature Injection and Commitment
The idea is that most of the time when business domain experts come and ask for something they very rarely tell you and express it in terms of the value they want, they often come up with a half-baked solution. What we actually want though is something which is a set of examples that can drive the Agile development process but driven by value. Feature injection has three very simple steps, first step is find the value, second step is inject the features, as we call it, and the third step is break the model.

Why Hadoop and Solr in DataStax Enterprise?
Today’s modern LOB applications have new data requirements that have proven to exceed the capabilities offered by legacy RDBMS’s. ... because the data requirements of modern applications are different today, the types of technology and data management vendors have also changed, both on the LOB and data warehouse sides. With this change has also come a change in technology regarding how analytics and search are handled in modern LOB and data warehouse systems.

U.S. and Russia sign pact to create communication link on cyber security
“We recognize that threats to or in the use of [computer technologies] include political-military and criminal threats, as well as threats of a terrorist nature, and are some of the most serious national and international security challenges we face in the 21st century,” President Obama and President Vladimir Putin said in the joint statement, issued by the White House.

Quote for the day:

"Fear will keep you alive in a war. Fear will keep you alive in business. There's nothing wrong with fear" -- Norman Schwarzkopf

June 17, 2013

Guide for Applying the Risk Management Framework to Federal Information Systems

The intent of this common framework is to improve information security, strengthen risk management processes, and encourage reciprocity among federal agencies. This publication, developed by the Joint Task Force Transformation Initiative Working Group, transforms the traditional Certification and Accreditation (C&A) process into the six-step Risk Management Framework (RMF).

Redefining Hot and Cold Data
Data warehouses that could accomplish the feat of defining and managing data aging policies then had to script, code, automate, schedule, verify and monitor that the entire process was working correctly in production. Most of the time, data architects would take a simplified approach of identifying data classes (or use fewer storage tiers) to make this process achievable.

Meet Google's 'Project Loon': Balloon-powered Net access
In addition to providing access to the two out of every three people on earth ... another goal of the Google[x] team behind Project Loon is to help with maintaining communications following natural disasters. The solar-powered, remote-controlled balloons would navigate stratospheric winds 20 kilometers above the surface of the earth, well above the altitude where most planes travel. Similar to the way satellite internet works, the balloons would communicate with special antennas and receiver stations on the ground.

Why Strategies Fail
After all, a lot of smart, educated, motivated people try hard to make them succeed. In this 30-minute speech, delivered at a conference (sponsored by The IE Group) of Chief Strategy Officers in New York City on December 9, 2011, you will learn some surprising, thought-provoking answers. The speaker is Mark Chussil, Founder and CEO of Advanced Competitive Strategies, Inc.

Don’t Just Cut “IT” Costs, Optimise…….
Round two of IT cost optimization is a story of big changes, strategic shifts, improved IT management practices, rightsizing IT service levels, “doing less with less,” better IT demand management and taking advantage of what new IT services the marketplace has to offer. Gartner sees four areas of opportunity for cost optimisation, ranked by level of difficulty as well as their potential to deliver valu

Federal Cloud Computing Strategy
Cloud computing offers the government an opportunity to be more efficient, agile, and innovative through more effective use of IT investments, and by applying innovations developed in the private sector If an agency wants to launch a new innovative program, it can quickly do so by leveraging cloud infrastructure without having to acquire significant hardware, lowering both time and cost barriers to deployment

IT Heads have been given a mandate of influencing the non-IT functions and business groups
The clear road map for future CIOs is to be the change and bring about change within their organisations. The new arena of technology includes data deluge, big data, agility, security, cloud etc., which are providing the necessary impetus to the IT leaders in making a transformation and driving innovation.

How to prevent code rot
A system that needs periodic attention indicates poorly designed automation, ... if the systems are neglected for too long, they fall apart. In software development, we call that code rot. When nobody pays attention to a section of working code, it suddenly doesn’t work any more. ... This happens so frequently that it almost doesn’t surprise us any more. The code didn’t change itself (at least, most code can’t do that), so how did this happen?

Has the CIO lost Big Data?
Should CIOs cede the Big Data battle and let CMOs take charge of these types of initiatives? After all, there is an abundance of recent precedents for Marketing taking over technically oriented initiatives, from the early days of the web, to marketing automation, to social media. While it may be tempting to let Big Data slip from IT’s fingertips, Big Data will be a cornerstone of future enterprise technology, and is an area where the CIO can add demonstrable value.

There is a Cowboy in my Domain! - Implementing Domain Driven Design Review and Interview
Many more people want to do Domain Driven Design (DDD) than understand how to use it. Vernon tackles this issue by guiding his readers through DDD’s principles, illustrating the importance and correct execution for each one. By providing a myriad of teaching techniques such as code samples, rules of thumb, a case study that progresses throughout the book, and ‘good ole cowboy logic’, IDDD reaches a level of accessibility that enables even the uninitiated to achieve an excellent understanding of DDD.

Quote for the day:

"Determination gives you the resolve to keep going in spite of the roadblocks that lay before you." -- Denis Waitley

June 16, 2013

Parallel Keynote: 8 Lines of Code
Greg Young is an independent consultant and entrepreneur. He is always involved with many concurrent projects, currently these include building out a distributed event store and mighty moose (a continuous test runner). In this InfoQ presentation, he discusses eight lines of very common code finding in them massive numbers of dependencies and difficulties, looking for ways to get rid of them.

Big Data: Rethinking the Platform
IT infrastructure teams will need to work with a wide range of other IT professionals in order to build big data platforms. This multidiscipline approach must also include a careful focus on the economics of the projects. Costs to consider include hardware, software, implementation, the risk of delays and problems, and the opportunity cost of not being able to run with other IT projects.

What You Need to Know about IT Asset Disposition
At the completion of the IT asset disposition process, assets are usually either resold or recycled. How they reach this final disposition, however, is rife with risk, if the process is not planned properly. The following are three risks associated with IT asset disposition that enterprises should account for in their risk management planning.

Why Google fears the totalitarian connotations of the buzzword big data.
Yet digging around a little, it looks to me like Google has all but banned “big data” from its communication with consumers. So far as I can determine, neither Google’s founders, Page and Sergey Brin, nor its chairman Eric Schmidt, have ever uttered the words big data in public (please correct me in the comments section if I’m wrong). A search of Google’s press releases also turns up exactly zero occurrences of the term.

ITSM Software is not a Silver Bullet
Our IT organization must define all the service management processes and procedures to meet the organization and business needs, but in many cases we do not know what they are, and we don’t have the time and/or expertise to do it. Of course, the consultants end up working in a vacuum with no access to in-house expertise, but still need to produce something quickly, so we end up with ‘stock’ generic processes that don’t match the way our IT is setup.

Expectations of Risk Management Outpacing Capabilities – It’s Time For Action
The Risk Management challenges are growing faster than most organizations' abilities to respond: today's complex environment requires an even stronger capability to master and optimize risk management. This is the main finding of a large-scale study of risk conducted by KPMG International, based on a global survey of 1,092 C-level respondents that was deployed by the Economist Intelligence Unit in December 2012.

Here’s Why Strategy Is So Misunderstood
Tactics, often mistaken for strategy, are the last piece of the puzzle that includes goals/objectives and strategies. Tactics are the ever-important short term decisions and activities that win battles and contribute to winning the war. In traditional manufacturing companies, sales departments know tactics better than most other functions because sales people work with tactics every day.

Inside the mind of a successful Android developer
As the founder of Cloud.tv, Christoff created the popular HD Widgets utility for Android, which is currently the 13th most popular paid app on the platform. His two-man startup has grown into a seven-person company now focused solely on Android development. JR Raphael had the chance to chat with Christoff about his experiences working with Android, both positive and negative, and the revelation that helped him turn a once-small side project into a booming full-time business.

New Categories for Data Center Best Practices (Part 3)
In this final installment, the focus shifts to high temperature ambient (HTA) data center operation. Once again, the advancements inenergy management are accelerating the momentum of an exciting trend by giving IT and facilities teams the oversight and controls necessary to minimize the associated risks.

An overview of High Availability and Disaster Recovery solutions available for SQL Server
With the more recent releases of SQL 2012 and Windows 2012, we are seeing the landscape of available options for SQL HA/DR specific architectures is improving significantly. Below is a summary of the high availability and disaster recovery solutions available for a SQL environment.

Quote for the day:

"Instead of looking for reasons to complain, look for ways to laugh." -- Ralph Marston

June 15, 2013

Intel wants to be your new cable provider
Intel this year plans to sell a set-top box and Internet-based streaming media service that will bundle TV channels for subscribers ... Intel's set-top box will also have a camera with recognition technology similar to that used in Microsoft's Kinect box. However, unlike Kinect, Intel's box won't track motion. It's more about identifying users and bringing up preset configurations on the box, Carvill said.

Data Design Is Not Optional
By applying a disciplined approach to the creation of these structures to store information it is possible to more easily make use of it, to find what one needs and to bring information from different systems together. This, in brief, is the practice of data modeling; and it serves a number of key functions:

3 Rules Every Entrepreneur Should Live By
With Agile, you simply are not allowed to assume everything is ok unless you hear otherwise. The point is to forever question whether you are still on the best path as a team and as a company given all the new input you receive each day. ... One of the toughest new skills I needed to learn with Agile was the willingness to question even the most basic of assumptions.

US cloud providers may have a harder time in Europe following NSA revelations
The debate over U.S. access to cloud data that the Patriot Act helped fuel has once again become a hot topic in the wake of revelations about surveillance programs such as Prism, under which the U.S. government is said to have access to data on servers supplied by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and Skype.

Why mentorship is the gift that keeps on giving
Mentors have the ability to accelerate the growth of others through their generous sharing of their perspectives, time, insights, coaching and experience. Is this a selfless act of service? Not even remotely. Savvy mentors stand to gain as much from the experience as do the proteges they guide and frequently a lot more. Are you on the fence about becoming a mentor? Consider these six ways you can personally benefit from the process.

CIOs Bullish on Cloud Benefits, But Worry About SaaS Data Silos
“Attitudes about using the cloud for business benefits are largely positive. Their biggest worry is the need to integrate their data between their different apps. SaaS solutions are just so easy to bring in, companies worry they might be creating silos of data,” Host Analytics’ CIO, Richard Broome, told IDN. ... BI makes sense as a way to solve a SaaS-sprawl of data silos, when one considers the business use cases, Broome added.

15 JavaScript Web UI library
Almost all of the rich Web applications are based on one or more Web UI library or framework, these UI library and framework greatly simplifies the development process, and to bring consistent, reliable, and highly interactive user interface. This article describes the 15 very powerful JavaScript Web UI library, ideal for a variety of all sizes-rich Web application development.

Business Architecture Making a Difference in their Organizations
Business architecture is still new enough that highly successful practices are difficult to find. Most organizations are struggling to get off the ground and gain traction. However, we can learn a lot from the currently successful trail blazers. Powerful business architecture practices – those making a significant difference in their organizations:

NASA CIO unable to implement effective IT governance
"We found that the complexity of the board structure and a lack of documentation and training to explain the interrelationship of the boards has led to confusion among agency IT personnel about the roles and responsibilities of the boards and diminished their value to the governance process," write report authors. It's also unclear what issues and initiatives must go before the boards for approval, so IT managers instead rely on informal relationships to move projects forward, says OIG.

SLAs crucial for cloud security
Morgan notes that chief accountability for data security will always rest with the enterprise itself. However, careful selection of the cloud service provider and the SLAs in place can help to mitigate any risks. ... “You need to look before you leap. There are few service providers who can do it properly.” Morgan says enterprises should assess what the cloud solution was built for – ask: is it for test and development only, or can we put production workloads in the cloud?

Quote for the day:

"Without courage, you cannot practice any of the other virtues." -- Maya Angelou,

June 14, 2013

FDA calls on medical device makers to focus on cybersecurity
"Many medical devices contain configurable embedded computer systems that can be vulnerable to cybersecurity breaches," the FDA said in its recommendations. "As medical devices are increasingly interconnected, via the Internet, hospital networks, other medical device, and smartphones, there is an increased risk of cybersecurity breaches, which could affect how a medical device operates."

Continuous Improvement and the Agile Restrospective
At some point an organization will notice that the unique requirements of its culture, business domain or a particular project aren't adequately addressed by the boilerplate versions of these practices. At that point, if the company sticks to its guns and continues to go by the book, it misses out on an important opportunity to improve its team, its processes and its product.

Google Play Developer 8-Step Checkup
Google Play gives you tons of options on publishing your apps and connecting with users. But as you get started with new features like beta testing and staged rollouts, it’s a good idea to do a checkup and make sure you’ve covered the basics.

Open Source Project 'Weave' Aids Java Devs Using YARN
Continuuity announced today the public availability of its new Apache Hadoop data processing framework Weave product, a next-gen Apache Hadoop data processing framework. Weave is a framework designed to ease the process of writing distributed applications by providing developers with a set of interfaces that allow them to manage resources, nodes and jobs within those apps through an abstraction layer built on YARN.

Neural Network Activation Functions in C#
Understanding neural network activation functions is essential whether you use an existing software tool to perform neural network analysis of data or write custom neural network code. This article describes what neural network activation functions are, explains why activation functions are necessary, describes three common activation functions, gives guidance on when to use a particular activation function, and presents C# implementation details of common activation functions.

US prosecutors propose kill switch to prevent smartphone theft
One of the ideas presented by Schneiderman is a "kill switch" that would render a smartphone useless. Disabling a smartphone should be as easy as canceling a credit card, Schneiderman said. Smartphone theft is a multibillion dollar industry and the kill switch or equivalent features would eliminate the financial incentive to steal cellphones, Schneiderman said.

The Ten Virtues of Outstanding Leaders
Philosophers Al Gini and Ronald Green suggest ten virtues or traits of character and as such they describe not just a leader's behavior but a clear sense of the way a leader thinks; the beliefs and motivations behind their actions. They note that these virtues are fragmentary in that they can exist apart from one another and rarely does any leader possess all of them.

IT department could disappear by the end of the decade, says Forrester
“It is important to recognise that there are significant elements of enterprise technology that are commoditising, or have already commoditised - the core infrastructure, the virtual servers, the enterprise applications, the core systems of record,” said Mines. “But there is a new class of technology that is aimed at customer engagement, and aimed at the front end of the business.

How big data and statistical modeling are changing video games
Bill Grosso described how over the past three years, game studios have switched from viewing analytics as a primarily descriptive tool to deploying modern data collection practices, machine learning toolkits, and statistical methods to gain a deeper understanding of player behavior, predict outcomes, and modify their games and business practices in real-time to improve both the user experience and revenue.

The Password Reset Conundrum
Password resets are an important and required step after a password or any other significant breach of a system, and it is inarguable that changing all the passwords in a breached system provides a measurable and tangible improved security profile. The unfortunate reality is that requiring a password change is not enough. Clearly creating systems that provide protections in addition to, or instead of, passwords are a great way to mitigate this risk...

Quote for the day:

"When you have a number of disagreeable duties to perform, always do the most disagreeable first. " -- Josiah Quincy

June 13, 2013

Wrestling with the concept of private PaaS
Before comparing private versus public PaaS, it's important to understand the definition of Platform as a Service as a technology. PaaS, no matter if it's private or public, provides basic development, deployment and operations capabilities that support the design, coding, testing and management of cloud-based systems. The value of this technology is that it provides your enterprise an alternative to support whatever development tools are in style at the time, including purchasing the servers on which to run them.

Here, FIDO! If We Build Stronger Authentication, Will Consumers Come?
Formed in July 2012, the Fast IDentity Online (FIDO) Alliance is developing specifications for "an open, scalable, interoperable set of mechanisms that supplant reliance on passwords to securely authenticate users of online services". ... There's usually a bit of a chicken-and-egg dynamic at play between vendors, sites, and users – each group needs to believe there is (or will be) a critical mass of the other two, to make their own adoption worthwhile.

New Android malware should be wake-up call for security admins
As soon as a Java or Flash exploit is found, for example, hackers go out and create code that can take advantage of it, and then try to get as many people as possible before a fix happens. But the serious desktop threats are those pieces of malware which are sophisticated enough to use many paths of entry, and complex enough to remain undetected via multiple means of stealth. This is what this particular malware is doing.

Facebook and Microsoft join call to disclose FISA requests
"We would welcome the opportunity to provide a transparency report that allows us to share with those who use Facebook around the world a complete picture of the government requests we receive, and how we respond. "We urge the United States government to help make that possible by allowing companies to include information about the size and scope of national security requests we receive, and look forward to publishing a report that includes that information."

CEM Method advanced principles 2013
BP Group have got to get scientific about the customer experience. CEMMethod has grown and developed over the last decade to make this a reality - get the latest thinking here. ... The CEMMethod® techniques and approaches are flexible and straight forward to use.On occasions an extensive toolkit may be required, in other situations point solutions may be appropriate.

iRobot's New Ava 500 Puts Robotics In Heart Of The Enterprise
The Ava 500 is an autonomous, high-end audio, HD video, top-of-the-line telepresence robot designed to be your meeting surrogate in the enterprise. In the official announcement today, the two companies called the Ava 500 a self navigating, video collaboration robot with Cisco TelePresence EX60. ... The Ava 500 was carefully designed to represent the physical space a human would occupy and deliver an experience that wasn’t a barrier to communications.

90 PC of Organizations will not own or control data: Gartner
"As the amount of personal information increases multifold, individuals and their personal data will increasingly become a security target. And, yet in most scenarios the organization is still ultimately accountable for the personal data on its IT systems," said Carsten Casper, research vice president at Gartner. "The time has come to create an exit strategy for the management of personal data. Strategic planning leaders will want to move away from storing and processing personal data in the next five years."

When Can Worse Data Quality Be Better?
Like truth, beauty, and art, data quality can be said to be in the eyes — or the ears — of the beholder. So, if your favorite music sounds fine to you in MP3 file format, then not only do you not need vinyl records, audio tapes, and CDs anymore, but if you consider MP3 files good enough, then you will not pay more attention to (or pay more money for) audio data quality.

A variety of options make data center expansion difficult
A containerized data center uses prefabricated containers to provide computing space along with suitable power and cooling infrastructure. Containers are dropped off (often on-premise) and interconnected to an existing facility. Additional containers can be deployed as computing needs grow. Containers are often a good fit for long-term projects such as disaster recovery preparedness or during data center renovations.

HP adds purpose-built all-flash array to 3Par lineup
There are other flash-only arrays, including new platforms from startups, that have hardware and software tuned to take advantage of flash drives, said Leah Schoeb, an analyst at Evaluator Group. "The nice thing HP has done is, they've done it within an existing architecture," Schoeb said. As a result, the 7450 brings along features that have been refined on the 3Par platform over the years, including thin provisioning, data compression, replication and snapshots, she said.

Quote for the day:

"Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success." -- Henry Ford

June 12, 2013

Israel accelerates cybersecurity know-how as early as 10th grade
“What Israel has done is focus much more heavily on technical skills and leave the political work to the politicians,” says Alan Paller of the SANS Institute, who examined Israeli cybersecurity strategy as part of the US Department of Homeland Security’s Task Force on CyberSkills last summer. “Their skill level [per capita] … outdoes everyone, even China,” he adds, despite China’s “massive program” for developing skilled cyber experts.

Podcast recap: HP Experts analyze and explain the HAVEn big data news from HP Discover
There has been a lot said about big data in the last year and HP has made a big announcement around a broader vision for businesses to help them gain actionable intelligence from literally a universe of potential sources and data types. To learn how, BriefingsDirect assembled Chief Evangelist at HP Software, Paul Muller; Chris Selland, Vice President of Marketing at HP Vertica, and Tom Norton, Vice President for Big Data Technology Services at HP.

3 Motivational Mind Tricks Desgned to Power Progress
Understanding how we react to progress is crucial to capitalizing on its power to motivate and engage us with our work. Ignoring it costs day after day of losing steam, running to and fro with carrots and sticks, and losing interest from what feels like an endless run in a hamster wheel. These three mind tricks of progress serve employees and managers alike to break free from hamsterdom and actually get somewhere.

People Don’t Need Cloud, but Flexibility + Control over Data
The other aspect is converged cloud. “Every customer will follow a different path to the cloud,” and HP focuses on how to help them take the journey to the cloud, Neri explains. ... One of the customers’s biggest concerns is “all about change management.” IT, the business owners, they all need to be part of the conversation. “They really get very uncomfortable when they feel they are losing control. It is our role to show them they keep control.”

Why your CMO may spend more money on the cloud than your CIO
"As technology budgets move to the CMO and marketing becomes more data-driven, Salesforce could become the system of record for all customer interactions. Since interactions touch current and future revenue, CRM has the potential to become more central to a business than current transaction systems of record."

IBM’s cognitive computing team takes on a new frontier: meal planning
Working with chefs at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City, the IBM team is building a cognitive computing system that, given plenty of data about what foods most people already like, will be able to come up with inventive, delicious flavor combinations—far beyond the familiar pairings of tomato and basil, chocolate and strawberry, chicken and rosemary.

Skepticism Moves Big Data Toward Causation
An interesting practical implication of the correlation-causation dilemma, noted by industry luminary Cathy O’Neil, is the risk that putting machine learning techniques in the hands of analytics initiates may be dangerous, since the newbies might be too credulous with the findings, drawing inference from spurious correlations that can lead business astray. I bet many new easy-out big data vendors hope that thought doesn’t gain traction!

Secret NSA hackers from TAO Office have been pwning China for nearly 15 years
Apparently “Beijing was furiousabout the sudden elevation of cybersecurity and Chinese espionage on the meeting's agenda.” That’s when the director of China's National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team claimed to have "mountains of data" about the US hacking China. The Chinese version of CERT also disclosedthat between January 1 and May 31, "4,062 US-based control servers hijacked 2.91 million mainframes in China.

Leading Through a Crisis
When everything is broken, what do you do first? How do you show your concern when 1,000 things need attention? If you go to work on five of them, those who feel the most pain about the other 995 will think you don’t care. Furthermore, if you try to work on too many things, you will squander your finite resources while making little progress—thus undermining trust. So what can you do?

How to Evolve your Master Data Management Practices
With maturing data management and additional data sources, your master data management practices need to follow suit. That means finding a new level of support systems for MDM to keep up with evolving business outcomes and expectations. Michele Goetz, analyst with Forrester Research, has been carving out a new framework to bring MDM from the traditional “golden record” to a more rounded “golden profile.” Here are six emerging considerations.

Quote for the day:

"Learn to pause.... or nothing worthwhile will catch up to you." -- Doug King

June 11, 2013

4 Killer New Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Features
In this new R2 release, Microsoft has reconfigured the architecture to use RDS, even without a network connection. You are probably wondering how that even possible, considering RDS requires an IP address and the network for proper connectivity. Well, the new technology that is enabling RDS without network connectivity is leveraging the VM Bus.

Complexity, skills, experience lie at heart of mobile testing shortfall
There are a litany of reasons to explain the shortfall in mobile testing at the enterprise level, starting with its sheer complexity. Multiple devices, running on multiple platforms using bandwidth provided by multiple networks is a dramatic change in how enterprises manage computing. “At the end of the day, mobile is not an isolated effort,” says Gal Tunik, senior project manager of Functional Testing and Mobile Delivery, Software at HP. “It must be integrated into the normal delivery process.”

Eight is enough! IT's biggest frenemies
You probably have a good idea about who your enemies are. But what about your frenemies? ... The biggest problem with frenemies is that you have to work with these people. You might even have to be nice to them. But while you may never end up BFFs, you don't have to put up with all their shenanigans. Here are eight common frenemies and how to keep them in check.

Fast IPC - New implementation
"For a few years I used excellent shared memory IPC implementation by studio_ukc: While it is really fast, there are several drawbacks. Also, many members were routinely asking for the working code of that class - the one available for the download needs to be fixed (although some fixes are available in comments section). I decided to go ahead and upload my own implementation based on the same idea, but with most of drawbacks eliminated. Please read original article before proceeding with this one."

Creating custom shapes in PowerPoint 2010
PowerPoint has a lot of great preset shapes, but sometimes what you really need is a custom shape tailored-made for your presentation. If you’re looking to go beyond the Freeform Tool to create more complex custom shapes, make use of the new feature in PowerPoint 2010 and upwards called Combine Shapes. The Combine Shapes tool allows you to create new shapes by combining multiple shapes in one of four ways: Union, Combine, Subtract, or Intersect.

Showing Your Customers the Respect They Deserve
Storyboarding is a great example of "meeting the customer on their turf." The pictures don't have to be polished, but the storyboard must be complete enough to tell a full story, and that takes effort. By creating the storyboard, the team has done all the mental heavy lifting. The customer gets to experience the story and provide their reactions. It tells the customer: "Your time is valuable, we want to respect it."

Private PaaS eases enterprise governance, cloud security concerns
Even if public PaaS is not an option for an organization, offering a private version lets IT operations teams provide developers with greater agility and self-service, while still being simpler to manage than a traditional development environment, said Chris Turra, a web operations engineer at Mozilla, the nonprofit Web development organization behind, among other things, the Firefox browser.

Secure Agile Software Development: Never One-and-Done
Obviously, with such a rapidly changing environment, we have to make sure that we do not employ point-in-time security controls. Security must be a constant, and as a result it needs to be integrated into the entire process. To do this, organizations must keep a few things in mind. ... Automation is key for most organizations as a result, and by automatically checking source code for security flaws, you can better ensure the security of that code before it goes into production.

IT chiefs worried by vendor lock-in risk missing out on cloud, big data
Rick Simmonds, managing partner at outsourcing advisors Alsbridge, which conducted the research, said companies often don't have the data readily available to know whether what they are getting is what they need in the current market. "Typically clients are negotiating outsourcing contracts every few years or so and in house there isn't great depths of current market information," he said.

Mentorship: 3 keys to success
It turns out that not everyone recognizes the greatest value of mentors until after the fact. Actually, many don’t realize they’re in a mentoring relationship until years later when they’re in the mentor’s shoes. One leader referred to his mentors as “the ones that didn’t fire me when they had grounds to, but helped me succeed instead.”

Quote for the day:

"In relative terms, we are in good shape. In absolute terms, we are not in the required shape. Unfortunately we have more threats than Finland, Sweden, or even the United States." -- Isaac Ben Israel

June 10, 2013

Automated Veriﬁcation of Design Patterns: A Case Study
Given the complexity of design veriﬁcation and the frequency by which they need be carried out, practitioners also need tools that automate and report any conﬂicts between design and implementation at the click of a button. However, these needs have so far been di cult to reconcile in practice. Proving and preserving the conformance of a program to its design documentation is largely an unsolved problem.

Google Biometrics Tests Show There's No Magic Pill for Passwords
Regina Dugan, who leads special projects at Google-owned Motorola, disclosed at the All Things Digital conference last week that the company was experimenting with the new forms of biometrics. The technologies are a long way from adoption, but they reflect the boldness with which Google is looking for password alternatives.

Silk platform combines blogging and data visualization
Silk mixes unstructured blogging with structured data, allowing you to visualize and query the structured portion of your information. "Explore" lets you generate a sortable table; bar, line or pie chart; or map (oddly, Silk will attempt to map non-geographic data, such as plotting "iOS" in Greece). Visualizations can be filtered interactively to look at just some columns or only records that meet certain criteria.

Business Analytics Will Be Central for Business Reinvention-Gartner
“We are rapidly heading towards a world of analytics everywhere,” said Dan Sommer Principal Research Analyst at Gartner. “Gartner predicts that analytics will reach 50 per cent of potential users by 2014. By 2020, that figure will be 75 per cent, and we will be in a world where systems of record, systems of differentiation and systems of innovation are enabling IT, business and individuals to analyze data in a much denser fashion than before.

Strategic capacity planning in virtualized data centers
Virtualization is great for streamlining data center operations, but overstuffing servers can easily backfire. The technology is here to stay, so IT teams must look to strategic capacity planning and make the most of their hardware or end up wrangling with inefficiencies in the future. Virtualization expert David Davis talks about maximizing server space, capacity planning tools and the challenges of capacity planning.

DHCS Unveils Enterprise Architecture Plan
The Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) unveiled its enterprise architecture plan, a technology blueprint to make progress on it's nearly $1 billion project portfolio and help implement the Affordable Care Act in California. In a presentation led by DHCS CIO and Deputy Director Chris Cruz, Enterprise Architect Ben Word and Chief Medical Information Officer Dr. Linette Scott, the department laid out it's guiding principles and detailed plans including business, information and technical architectures.

Meta-Decisions: Agreeing on the criteria before discussing the alternatives
In general, the difficulty in reaching an agreement is caused by the fact that different people are forming their opinions using different criteria. Thus, the solution to reduce the time spent in discussions and to make decisions faster is to first agree on the criteria that should be applied when choosing among the several options.

What Managers Can Do To Support Agile Transformation
In a phrase, Agile practices rely on building a collaborative culture. That means the HR department needs to create appropriate teams for the projects at hand, implement fluid systems of engagement versus the more stolid, rigid structures that used to serve organisations well and foster an environment that supports continuous learning at all levels of the enterprise.

3 Lessons From 5 Years Of Federal Data Center Consolidation Delays
Obviously, data center consolidation is more difficult than anyone expected it to be, a reality I've seen firsthand while working on the effort. The problems aren't unique to the public sector. A lack of record keeping and plain old resistance to change are universal human traits. I've learned a few lessons that may help make enterprise data center consolidation efforts more efficient than the feds have thus far been.

Intel unveils Thunderbolt 2
Thunderbolt 2, which had previously only been known by its code name Falcon Ridge, is a reworking of the original Thunderbolt interface to offer 20Gbps of bidirectional transfer rate. ... Thunderbolt made use of four independent 10Gbps channels, two upstream and two downstream, whereas Thunderbolt 2 combines these four channels into two 20Gbps bi-direction channels.

Quote for the day:

"Liberty is the right to do what I like; license, the right to do what you like." -- Bertrand Russell