Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

June 23, 2013

Video: The keys to identifying risk management metrics
In part three of this three-part video, shot at the Marcus Evans Enterprise Risk Management Conference in Chicago earlier this year, SearchCompliance editor Ben Cole sits down with five risk management professionals to discuss how companies can identify potential risk management metrics specific to their organization.

MemSQL makes it easier to import historical data and query it all under one roof
The latest iteration of the database, version 2.1, helps people who don’t speak the popular database query language SQL by allowing imports of old data in .CSV files, which can be created from familiar Excel spreadsheets. And loads of large data sets can happen fast, because MemSQL directs lots of compute cores to handle the work in parallel.

Google Glass Apps for Enterprises Coming by Early 2014
"Google has specifically ruled out facial recognition on the Glass platform today," McNelis said. "However I suspect that Google recognizes that this is a use case and a need. As the market warms up and Google figures out the right way to solve this, this would be a capability that one way or another would be possible."

The Enterprise Cloud: A Unified Architecture Means Unified Experience
So what exactly is “unified,” and is it different from an “integrated” system? In a word: absolutely. An integrated system is composed of multiple components that must be carefully fitted together to achieve the required functionality. This implies running many different servers and databases alongside some middleware that ties the whole thing together.

Don’t Let a Detail Derail a Purpose
Minding and managing details is essential to the proper functioning of your department and company, of this there can be little debate. ... The ability to separate the important details from the unimportant details is just as essential as paying attention to them. Many times in our focus on details, we give them too much power and let them paralyze a project or distract us from more important things. Some of the more common areas this occurs in order of frequency:

Netflix open sources its Hadoop manager for AWS
While Genie is near the top of the overall stack, the foundation is interesting, as well. Rather than maintaining a massive set of instances (or multiple separate ones) running the Hadoop Distributed File System, Netflix uses Amazon’s S3′s object storage service as its big data bit bucket, so all of its Hadoop jobs access the common, reliable data store.

Lousy Leaders Coddle
Coddling, like all leadership behaviors, reflects attitudes about yourself and others. Coddling isn’t compassionate it’s needy, misguided, self-important, and self-propagating. ... Experience is insight and confidence gained by struggling through new challenges and opportunities. Experience makes things easier. You know what works. Inexperience, on the other hand, makes things harder. That’s how it’s supposed to be!

Schedule First, then Budget
The best project managers establish the schedule before finalizing the budget, even if senior management is screaming for the money portion. ... It’s truly best to try to determine how much time is really required to complete a project before you let your money – or lack thereof - get in the way of your detailed project planning and real-world thinking.

Why do great Indian companies like Infosys self-destruct?
Poor strategic decision-making, fuelled by 'hubris and arrogance', results in poor capital allocation which destroys RoCE (return on capital employed) and creates financial stress," the brokerage adds.
Ambit says the transformation from a "great" company to a laggard takes place through the following phases.

S'pore starts to chart great tech unknown of 2025
The committee will study five areas: technology and R&D, infrastructure, enterprise development, manpower and talent development, as well as sectoral transformation. The last area will study programmes that use infocomm and media to improve the way people live and help businesses to thrive. ... According to Dr Yaacob, a suite of shared business analytics services will be progressively made available to retail enterprises from the middle of this year.

Quote for the day:

"The pessimist borrows trouble; the optimist lends encouragement." -- William Arthur Ward

June 22, 2013

How it's made: The modular data center
Modular data center providers have opened additional factories to churn out modular data centers as fast as customers need them. The combination of standard components and an assembly line allows providers to deliver extra IT capacity to companies much faster than it would take them to build out a brick and mortar facility.

British intelligence tapping fiber-optic cables for massive amounts of data
The operation codenamed "Tempora" by Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been going on for at least 18 months and involves the use of "intercept probes" attached directly to transatlantic fiber-optic cables landing on British shores from telephone exchanges and Internet servers in North America.

The Power of Mornings: Why Successful Entrepreneurs Get up Early
Even if you aren't a morning person, you may have more willpower in the early hours than later in the day. "Willpower is like a muscle [that] becomes fatigued with over-use," says Vanderkam. During the course of the day as you're dealing with difficult people, making decisions and battling traffic, you use up your willpower, leaving you feeling depleted toward the end of the day.

The 1 Basic Question That Leads to Product Innovation
Steve Jobs downplayed the importance of market research, but that doesn't mean you should ignore what consumers think, writes Eric V. Holtzclaw. You should avoid relying too heavily on what's worked in the past as you attempt to develop new ideas. "Instead, companies should focus, like Jobs, on understanding consumers' unmet needs and work in that white space," he writes.

Humans and silicon don’t mix, but a new material coating could put chips inside our bodies
“People are the worst enemy of silicon,” said Paul Berger, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Ohio State University. “When we sweat, we sweat sodium and potassium out of our pores. That is the bane of a silicon device.” ... “The smart electronics are sequestered from the body,” Berger said. “What I’m trying to advocate is to put electronics in intimate contact with the body.”

Building with modern data center design in mind
Modern data center design involves planning carefully for the center's location, hardware and building infrastructure. It's certainly not as simple as "build warehouse, insert computers." This guide covers capacity planning tactics, tips for building facilities, hardware selection strategies and monitoring a data center's infrastructure.

Inside the mind of an enterprise software development organization
Understanding the dynamics of how vendors develop software can equip you to select, buy, and implement the best product on the most favorable terms. Here are specific points of advice. ... Enterprise software support and maintenance has a bad reputation, because vendors frequently fail to make the value proposition tangible; in addition, vendors sometimes do a poor job maintaining their own software, which makes matters worse.

Targeted Attacks Video Series
As Tim has written about before, the problem with the term APT is that it doesn’t describe this category of threats very accurately. This makes it harder to understand and mitigate this type of threat. ... In addition to a series of white papers, Microsoft is publishing a short series of videos that introduce many of the topics covered in these papers. In the videos Tim is joined by subject matter experts, including the CISO of Microsoft, to discuss these threats and possible mitigations.

Entrepreneurs in India Find Challenges -- and Niches
"The froth is yet to get cleared out," said Vikram Deswal, chief investment officer and portfolio manager at East Bridge Capital Management. "Lots of capital we've raised is from people who earlier had given capital to private equity funds in India. As of today, there is a lot more capital raised but not deployed. Interest in India remains, but people are licking their wounds."

Why Big Data will never beat business intuition
Our data-driven worlds are not only becoming smaller, they are becoming faster. The real-time flow of information persuades us to react to feedback constantly and instantly. ... Data might be able to predict new problems or find new solutions to existing problems, but only human intuition and ingenuity can come up with groundbreaking new ideas. That is a uniquely human gift—one that goes beyond merely fixing a problem or meeting a functional need.

Quote for the day:

"People of mediocre ability sometimes achieve outstanding success because they don't know when to quit. Most men succeed because they are determined to." -- George Allen

June 21, 2013

More Details on SQL Server 2014 In-Memory Capabilities
The in-memory Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) capability--formerly known by the codename Hekaton lets developers boost performance and reduce processing time by declaring tables as "memory optimized," according to a whitepaper (PDF download) titled "SQL Server In-Memory OLTP Internals Overview for CTP1."

Apple: iMessage and Facetime are encrypted so we can't hand over info
Apple said iMessage and FaceTime conversations were protected by end-to-end encryption so no-one but the sender and receiver could see or read them. "Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers' location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form." ... the most common form of request came from police investigating robberies and other crimes, searching for missing children, trying to locate a patient with Alzheimer's disease, or hoping to prevent a suicide.

Lawmakers move to block black box recorders in cars, DVR snooping
"For me, this is a basic issue of privacy," Rep. Mike Capuano (D-MA) said in a statement. "Consumers should have control over the information collected by event data recorders in their own vehicles and they should be able to exercise control over the recording function. Many consumers aren't even aware that this technology is already in most vehicles."

Personal Touch-Identification Tokens
Touch-based personal tokens would let devices unobtrusively identify who is interacting with the device at any given time. Devices could then tailor services to users and control access to sensitive information and online services. The authors present an approach for using a wearable personal token, in the form of a ring, to send an identification code to devices through touch.

From 4GLs to HTML5 desktop apps: Bringing data to the masses
"Our relationship with data has changed," Jer Thorp, a New York-based artist, educator and data-engagement entrepreneur, told ... "Data triage is something we have to do every day," he said. In addition, the data coming at us today often is hard to understand. The trouble is that too much of it just "looks like numbers," Thorp mused.

Delivering Personalized Digital Experiences for Better User Engagement... Sweet!
Providing highly personal, memorable digital experiences, however, requires enrichment of content; specifically, auto-tagging, categorization and sentiment analysis. To achieve all three and ensure accuracy in real-time, this enrichment process must be automated. ... As the rate of content grows exponentially, so does the need to join content created in-house with third party content, such as affiliate partner feeds and social media.

Dev Watch 6/14: API Management Heats Up
Developer tool and platform vendors are kicking the summer off with a slew of product and partnership announcements. In particular, we've been hearing a lot from providers of tools for publishing, promoting and overseeing application programming interfaces (APIs). Here are some API management product notes that wouldn't fit into the main news feed we thought you shouldn't miss:

Virtualisation security: Where firms are falling down
"Often they will take their traditional security that they have for their physical environment and try and deploy that in their virtual one. As a result there's an impact on performance, because the traditional security is not designed for their virtual environment. It doesn't take into account how the virtual environment behaves and will leave security holes," Trend product manager James Walker said.

What Successful People do with the First Hour of Their Work Day
"If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Expectations of Risk Management Outpacing Capabilities – It’s Time For Action
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. The aim was to find out about executives' perceptions of the risks facing their companies and their sense of how, and how well, their companies and industries are tackling them.

Quote for the day:

"It is better to look ahead & prepare than to look back & regret." -- Jackie Joyner-Kersee

June 20, 2013

The GRC maturity model and value proposition
Not surprisingly, organizations evolve with respect to GRC capabilities in different ways and timeframes and, at any given point, achieve varying levels of proficiency and benefit commonly described by stages of maturity. ... The Global Association of Risk Professionals provides us with an effective way to organize our thinking and facilitate conversations regarding the anticipated benefits of enacting integrated GRC programs.

Scaling Storage Is Hard To Do
No more monoliths or clusters. The new wave of startups recognize this, with companies and projects as diverse as Amazon S3, Cleversafe, Ceph, Exablox, Gridstore, and Convergent.io moving rapidly to offer object-based storage. Object storage is nothing new (hello Centera, HCP, Caringo, etc) but perhaps it has finally found its place at the center of the enterprise storage universe!

BSIMM4 measures and advances secure application development
The Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM, pronounced "bee simm") is an observation-based scientific model ... The most important use of the BSIMM is as a measuring stick to determine where your firm's software security initiative currently stands relative to other firms. Do this by noting which activities you already have in place, and useg "activity coverage" to determine the level and build a scorecard.

Evolution of search in big data as told by LucidWorks
The key challenge today is moving from rigid systems that gathered, organized, and analyzed data based upon previously known questions to dynamic systems that can immediately look at streams of rapidly changing data coming from many sources. Their hope is that today's systems can help analysts discover the right questions to ask, rather than just providing the answers to previously known questions.

Promoting yourself as a thought leader
You’ve spent time thinking about leadership. You’ve practiced its principles. You’ve come to understand what works and what doesn’t work. The next step for you may be articulating your leadership style in a way others can reproduce. Regardless of how you decide to disseminate your information, once you come to an executive position, sharing your leadership skills by living your truths and writing about them can benefit you and your organization.

Spy-proof enterprise encryption is possible, but daunting
"While all reputable companies will want to comply with the laws of the states in which they do business, encryption can give them full visibility into what is being monitored so that they can be a willing and active partner in government investigations," said Mark Bower, vice president of product management at data protection vendor Voltage Security, via email.

Do You Really Think for Yourself?
We are more susceptible to the influence of others than we might think. Get in touch with your beliefs. Don’t assume them to be true. But then again, don’t assume that others are right either. Use critical thinking. Ask why you believe what you believe. Groups can be quite influential at a subconscious level, causing us to change our minds without thinking.

Dimensions of Data Quality Under the Microscope
When discussing the level of agreement on the dimensions of quality, consensus of definition should be measured within its intended scope. Dimensions of quality are most often implemented as a part of a broader data quality/governance effort and, as such, are determined and maintained within a given unit of authority, like the data governance board of an organization. There is authority given to them by the leadership of that organization and consensus is only required within that group (or within the data management roles across the company).

Develop a compliance culture to implement anti-money laundering guidelines
Know your customer (KYC), an essential prescribed precaution, must be coupled with know your employees (KYE). There are a host of instances that highlight the involvement of employees in fraudulent transactions and in most cases in league with customers as the Cobrapost sting operation indicated. The sting operation captured employees advising the customers how they could convert their black money by opening multiple accounts, engaging mules, and many other such methods.

Stratos 2.0 Supports Any Runtime and 30 IaaS
Cartridges are a way of packaging a runtime making it available to be run on Stratos. There are two types of cartridges: Carbon and non-Carbon. Carbon or Product Cartridges are wrappers around WSO2 middleware products, including ESB, API Manager, Application Server, Governance Registry, Business Process Manager, Identity Server, WSO2 Message Broker, etc.. These cartridge are provided by WSO2.

Quote for the day:

"Unclear expectations lead to inefficient processes and subpar performance." -- Christine Lotze

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