Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

September 26, 2013

'Icefog' spying operation targeted Japan, South Korea
The "Icefog" hackers probed victims one by one, carefully copying select files and then exiting the systems, according to security vendor Kaspersky Lab, which released a 68-page report on the group Wednesday. "The nature of the attacks was also very focused," Kaspersky wrote. "In many cases, the attackers already knew what they were looking for."

Governance: More Than Just DataWhen an organization establishes its data governance program and the different tiers or levels of responsibility, this does not mean that other important “players” in the organization are not heard. Interviewing a number of experienced individuals across different roles regarding their views on data governance can give a unique perspective on the direction and possible initiatives where value can be added to your organization. You may find that there are similar, smaller initiatives occurring that can be leveraged.

Playing the economics game with IT lifecycle management
ITLM requires that you find out and log exactly what equipment assets are in the data center. Use an IT asset management tool. Many organizations carry out rudimentary asset management with spreadsheets with serial numbers and dates of purchase and delivery to keep track of items, but these systems rapidly become out-of-date as equipment is updated with new components.

Reduce Waste by Changing from Waterfall to Agile
The Agile Method does not attempt to “nail and freeze the requirements” all up front at one time. It assumes that the requirements will evolve and change as the customer begins to visualize their own requirements. ... Essentially, the Agile Method is a series of smaller contained waterfalls. End users and business stakeholders get to see and experience the system as it unfolds.

Enterprise security increasingly challenging, study finds
“Part of the problem is that information security professionals are typically having to take on the work and roles of two or three people,” Tipton told Computer Weekly at the (ISC)2Security Congress 2013 in Chicago. Tipton said the study indicates a shortfall of around 300,000 qualified information security professionals this year, which is evidenced by the constant poaching of the top people in the industry.

Review: Samsung's most affordable, triple-level cell SSD
The new processor boasts 400MHz clock speeds, compared with 300MHz in previous generations, so it's about 33% faster. That faster clock speed translates into a 27% increase in the number of input/output operations per second (IOPS), according to Samsung. The company has also advanced the signal processing in the controller -- a move that's designed to ensure that the higher-density drive keeps the same level of endurance and reliability as Samsung's previous SSDs.

Enhancing enterprise readiness of private clouds

SUSE today announced the general availability of SUSE Cloud 2.0, the next version of the original enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution for building Infrastructure-as-a-Service private clouds. Based on OpenStack Grizzly, it helps in setting up a mixed hypervisor private cloud environment that can be rapidly deployed and easily managed, helping enterprises increase business agility and reduce IT costs.

Oracle Channel Chief to Partners: Master Exadata
"We're rewarding partners for that behavior," said LaRocca. "And frankly, we need more partners selling Exadata. We need them invested and building competencies in the Exadata area. If you don’t have both hardware and software competencies, you wouldn’t have the confidence and ability to do Exadata." At the same time, Oracle has been driving ISVs to optimize their solutions for Exadata -- as part of a broader push called the Exastack program.

CIOs Share How They Made the Leap to CEO
The CEO job has never looked more attainable to CIOs. In today's business climate, the monster forces of social media, mobility and analytics technology are moving tectonic plates beneath traditional C-suite roles. CIOs are bumping up against fellow officers as IT becomes the number-one tool for building strategic advantage. A CIO who can make clever use of data and technology to create new revenue may be well-positioned to lead a company

Cloud Architecture: Get It Right The First Time
First, effective IT managers should map out their organization's specific goals in moving to the cloud, then search for the cloud service that seems most oriented toward meeting them. Unlike Facebook, which publishes the details of its infrastructure, Google offers little information about its own. Google Compute Engine, however, sits on the same infrastructure as Google Search.

Quote for the day:

“Put your best people on your biggest opportunities.” -- Jim Collins

September 25, 2013

How to Make Your In-memory NoSQL Datastores Enterprise-Ready
In-memory NoSQL datastores such as open source Redis and Memcached are becoming the de-facto standard for every web/mobile application that cares about its user’s experience. Still, large enterprises have struggled to adopt these databases in recent years due to challenges with performance, scalability and availability. ... This article will outline how to make an in-memory NoSQL datastore enterprise-ready, with tips and recommendations on how to overcome the top seven challenges associated with managing these databases in the cloud.

Virginia Tech breach exposes data on 145K job applicants
"The server was placed in service without our normal cyber protection protocols," thereby allowing illegal access to the data, Hincker said in an email. The university said the oversight allowed someone to illegally access the server and potentially the data it contained. "We became aware on Aug. 28 that it had been compromised," Hincker said without elaborating on how the university discovered the problem. In many cases, such data compromises go unnoticed until the breached entity is notified by law enforcement, credit card companies or victims.

Uses for Hadoop: Exploring the storage, appliance and analytics options
Hadoop can be a beneficial tool for big data environments, but according to John Webster, a senior partner at Boulder, CO-based Evaluator Group Inc., a lot of the criticism stems from a lack of understanding of the uses for Hadoop. In the first of this two-part podcast, Webster explains Hadoop's role in data storage, whether it can be used as an alternative to object storage and what needs to change to spread Hadoop adoption. Listen to the podcast or read the transcript below.

Are You a High-Performer--or Just an Overachiever?
An overachiever can ram through a new marketing strategy. They can wear down a recalcitrant team member. They will outlast a recession, explode past their competition, annihilate technical constraints. This all looks good from a distance, but up close, internally, it’s tearing muscle from bone, weakening the business. Performance-based leaders, on the other hand, deliver results while building up the business, not weakening it. Like the overachiever, they make things happen, but at the same time, they make their organization better, fitter, more growth-oriented, rather than weakening it.

Value-Based Health Care Is Inevitable and That’s Good
Data can help identify variations in clinical practice, utilization rates, and performance against internal and external benchmarks, leading to improved quality and a sustained change in culture. Last year, we established a values-based care team, which seeks to eliminate unnecessary practice variation by developing evidence-based care paths across diseases and to improve comprehensive care coordination so that patients move seamlessly through the system, reducing unnecessary hospitalizations and ER visits.

Look before you leap: Evaluating cloud migrations in high-performance LAN environments
On paper, cloud looks great. You're going to save a bundle of money, have less headaches to deal with, less systems to manage, etc. But you suspect that if you move your systems and data that run at LAN speeds to the cloud, productivity could grind to a proverbial halt. But at some point, you may need to prove it to senior management, and, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” probably won’t cut it, Han. Besides, don’t you really want to know for sure before putting up a fight?

Neural Network Data Normalization and Encoding
A topic that's often very confusing for beginners when using neural networks is data normalization and encoding. Because neural networks work internally with numeric data, binary data (such as sex, which can be male or female) and categorical data (such as a community, which can be suburban, city or rural) must be encoded in numeric form. ... This article explains how to normalize and encode neural network data from a developer's point of view. The process is conceptually simple but surprisingly difficult to implement.

Cisco reveals its Internet of Everything router
The system is not a core router like the Cisco CRS, or a successor to the CRS, the company says. Rather, it is a network fabric designed to scale CRS cores and ASR 9000 edge routers in service provider networks from centralized systems to distributed architectures able to accommodate the growth of Internet connected "things," like cars, homes and machines.

Better Agile Adoptions
Usually, the following pattern is used to implement Agile methods, usually after a small pilot test of Agile with a small team: Authority says we are all “going Agile”; Authority says we will be using a specific practice, like Scrum, or Kanban, or some other Agile practice, method, or framework. The message is that this is not negotiable; Authority selects a coach on the basis of his or her expertise with the prescribed practices. Typically, Scrum skills. The coach is imposed on the people, just like the prescribed Agile practices.

Quote for the day:

"Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be." -- Jack Welch

September 24, 2013

Microsoft's Surface 2 Tablet Follows Faithfully in the Footsteps of Failure
Despite the fresh name and a handful of helpful tweaks, the Surface 2 is still saddled with the same ho-hum value proposition and half-baked Windows RT operating system as the original Surface RT--a disaster that ended up costing Microsoft nearly $1 billion in write-downs. The Surface 2 doesn't look any more appealing.

Intel's Haswell-Y promises PC performance in tablets
Lately Intel has been focused on its Atom processor and tablets, but there’s another new chip in its family that could prove to be equally important. The latest Haswell-Y processors use so little power that they are now a viable option for tablets and 2-in-1 devices. The focus on power efficiency in Core processors is nothing new. Even before laptop shipments eclipsed desktops for the first time five years ago, Intel began working on power and it has long offered a line of low-voltage Core processors--typically rated at around 15 watts compared with 37 watts for standard notebook chips.

Using predictive analytics to make your data actionable (part 1)
Predictive analytics can only be actionable if incorporated into operational processes. Businesses do not just need the power to know, they need the power to act. If they are able to work through the challenges highlighted above, they will be well on their way to developing the crystal ball that is proven to deliver tremendous value and insight that drives growth.

Tips for Tuning the Garbage First Garbage Collector
This is the second article in a two-part series on the G1 garbage collector. You can find part one on InfoQ July 15, 2013: G1: One Garbage Collector To Rule Them All. Before we can understand how to tune the Garbage First garbage collector (G1 GC), we must first understand the key concepts that define G1. In this article, I will first introduce the concept and then talk about how to tune G1 (where appropriate) with respect to that concept.

Indifferent innovation
If only customers were smart enough to use the products in the way in which they were designed to be used, everything would be hunky-dory. What we as innovators need to understand is that instead of ridiculing customers who use products in unorthodox ways or for unintended uses, we should be asking: why? Why are people using our product in these unintended ways? What could they possibly gain from doing that? And, what could we learn if we'd simply understand that, to misquote Kotler, people don't want drills, they want holes.

Gartner: 64% of organizations looking at Big Data projects this year
“For big data, 2013 is the year of experimentation and early deployment,” said Frank Buytendijk, Gartner research vice president. “Adoption is still at the early stages with less than 8% of all respondents indicating their organization has deployed big data solutions. 20% are piloting and experimenting, 18% are developing a strategy, 19% are knowledge gathering, while the remainder has no plans or don’t know.”

Health IT Advocates Press for Interoperability
The push for greater interoperability around EHR systems was one of three "asks" the health IT advocates lobbied for in their meetings with lawmakers and staffers. They are also prevailing on members to champion a nationwide strategy for identifying patients and accurately matching them to their EHRs, citing industry estimates that between 8 percent and 14 percent of medical records contain faulty information that results from misidentifying the patient.

Selling SaaS: Operational requirements for consumers vs. businesses
The key to successfully selling Software as a Service (SaaS) across all market segments is recognizing and addressing the different operational requirements among different buyer groups, which often stem from the value propositions that drive SaaS in the consumer, SMB and enterprise market segments.

We Need a New Approach to Solve the Innovation Talent Gap
Observing this problem, I’ve begun wondering: What if there was a talent exchange model that wasn’t people and skill centric, but rather project and role centric? Said differently, I think the existing talent evaluation models should be reversed. Right now the model starts with people, then skills, then accomplishments. Validating the information is getting better (due to innovations such as LinkedIn’s endorsed skills), but most accomplishments are not vetted.

Java exploits seen as huge menace so far this year
"Of the top five most targeted vulnerabilities, four are found in the Java development, either the Runtime Environment (JRE) or the browser plug-in," according to the report, based on information about attacks detected through F-Secure's sensors and telemetry systems. The company notes that it's not surprising Java is an appealing target since "next to the Windows operating system (also a popular target for exploits), Java is probably the second most ubiquitous program in an organization's IT setup."

Quote for the day:

"Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless." --Thomas A. Edison

September 23, 2013

Here’s what you need to know about the Apple TouchID “hack”
A big selling point of the new generation of fingerprint readers, including that in the iPhone 5s, is that they don’t simply read the outer, dead layer of skin – instead, they use a radio frequency (RF) scanner to read a living layer of skin underneath. ... then TouchID isn’t actually that good at making sure it’s dealing with a living finger. It appears that it can be fooled by, as Starbug describes, breathing on the latex sheet “to make it a tiny bit moist” before using it on the sensor.

Vodafone pilots ‘Virtual Shelf’ shopping wall
"We are combining the traditional grocery store with the online store," Bruser continued. "We invented the idea and we developed the Virtual Shelf in partnership with Vodafone, who supplied the LED screens for the display and helped us in making our idea become a reality." The Virtual Shelf is based on an array of monitors so does not include NFC tags in the display itself — something which is much more easily achieved with printed shopping walls.

The Dysfunctionally Connected Workplace
Our friends at the Ken Blanchard Companies just released an stunning inforgraphic about leadership and communication. According to their research, over 80% of leaders don’t listen effectively or give praise to their followers. Check out the entire info graphic below or click on it to download it as a PDF.

Introduction to Java multitenancy
Sharing the JVM saves both memory and processor time. But with traditional JVM technology, sharing the JVM normally removes any remaining isolation from the infrastructure layer, requiring the top-level application itself to provide that isolation. This article introduces the multitenant feature that's available for trial use in IBM's latest Java 8 beta. This feature enables deployments to gain the advantages of sharing the JVM while it maintains better isolation than can be achieved when a traditional JVM is shared.

Towards a Blended Reality: Interview with augmented reality pioneer Thad Sterner
With no need to "want" I'll always get the digital things I need in the physical world. This experience of a "blended realty" won't be far off from a true experience of a digital Singularity. "Doe's it blend?" will have a whole new meaning when applied to digital gadgets and technologies. Here is an interview of Nikola Danaylov talking with Thad Starner, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and technical lead for Google Glass.

Larry Ellison Unveils ‘In Memory’ Oracle Databases
In a speech to kick off a big Oracle conference in San Francisco, Ellison discussed the launch of a new database that stores information on memory chips rather than disk drives. He said with speeds 100 times faster than traditional databases, a retailer can analyze its sales trends quickly and make adjustments accordingly. Such “in-memory” databases have been getting more popular, aided by technology changes and lower prices for memory chips. Ellison also unveiled new back-end computing hardware to pair with the software, and a new type of machine to back up its zippier databases.

COBOL on an Integration Spree
The key has been to keep the language current with new processing ideas and new capabilities. This makes it easy to adapt COBOL to new environments even though it is a mature language with a lot of operating lines of code. COBOL has a unique capability in that the same COBOL code can be compiled into native code, .NET and to the JVM without changing a single line of code.

E-SBCs take on WebRTC gateway and BYOD security functionality
The battle lines are being drawn over where WebRTC will connect in enterprise UC platforms. With WebRTC standards firming up and support already built into Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox browsers, real-world deployments of Web-enabled communication applications are just on the horizon. Staking a claim as the logical broker for WebRTC applications, nearly every E-SBC vendor has included support for the standard in their product roadmap.

Managing Sustainability in Development Projects
Scholars have described a dichotomous nature of sustainability where the linkages between sustainable development and project management may be spotted. The famous dichotomy is that “Sustainability is about both short term and long term orientation”. This dichotomous nature of sustainability describes well the linkage between sustainable development and project management. In fact, the project nature is mostly short-term though the wish is to get it flowing in the long term orientation of the organization.

Cloud Shines Brightly as Future of Disaster Response IT
Disaster response IT comprises the same building blocks as traditional IT—servers, networks, applications and the like—but its deployment is as unpredictable as the disasters themselves. Moreover, in the best-case scenario, money invested in response technology will never be used in practice. For disaster responders, this unique challenge creates an intricate calculus of benefit against cost, in which, unlike traditional IT, what sits in the balance is human life and well-being, rather than simply productivity and efficiency.

Quote for the day:

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

September 22, 2013

The next big market for data and connected devices? Agriculture
Alicia Asin, the CEO of sensor-making company Libelium, said in a recent interview that 18 percent of her company’s €3 million (about $4 million) in sales this year came from agricultural buyers. ... Finding the right historical weather patterns that might match the current conditions is something connected weather stations could help with. At a more fundamental level, bringing the data about crops online and matching it to weather patterns could help him select better crops as the climate shifts.

The Skillset of a Big Data Analyst
A big data analyst needs to be able to support the business and management with clear and insightful analyses on the data at hand. This includes data mining skills (including data auditing, aggregation, validation and reconciliation), advanced modelling techniques, testing and creating and explaining results in clear and concise reports.

The Best Online Learning Platforms
Online learning platforms or E-Learning has become very popular nowadays offering thousands of different courses from Business, Marketing, Science and Health. We have listed 6 of the best learning platform, free & paid, for you entrepreneur or not to gain new skills.

How I Got My Team To Fail More
When I talked about the failure metric and freeing the team to become more entrepreneurial, some in the larger PBS organization translated this as the digital group wanting a license to be undisciplined. So we worked to build a digital team that was left-brain, right-brain — embracing the nonlinear right-brain mojo of a startup (entrepreneurial, fast-moving, unafraid of risk) while filtering every initiative through the left-brain empirical rigor of goals, metrics, and KPIs. The KPIs also helped ensure our failures were disciplined failures, not the result of sloppiness.

Want Project Success? Kill the Ambiguity!
This insight about ambiguity is why people not only treat ambiguous, inexact, incomplete, or vague information as insufficient, but actually discount the data altogether. The frustrating implication for project managers is that, as a result of this aversion, people behave as if they have no information at all. Good change leaders must become good at converting ambiguous goals and plans into concrete, specific steps and messages to guarantee the behavior change they seek.

HDMI 2.0: What you need to know
The most important thing to understand about HDMI 2.0 is the increase of the size of the "pipe" transmitting data from the source (like a future native 4K Blu-ray player or PC) to display. This makes possible the increased frame rates at high resolutions. It also allows even more interesting lower-resolution images. For example, HDMI 2.0 supports dual video streams, so you can get two full HD shows on the same screen at the same time.

Big-Data a Big Deal for Executives
The 2013 survey indicates that a robust 91 percent of executives responded that their organizations have a big-data initiative planned or in progress. Of those, 60 percent of executives report that at least one big-data initiative has been implemented, with 32 percent reporting that big-data and initiatives are fully operational, in production, or operationalized across the corporation. Big-data, of course, is a term used to describe a collection of data so large, complex, or requiring such rapid processing, that they become difficult or impossible to work with using standard database management or analytical solutions.

Write I/O Performance & High Availability in a scale-out Distributed File System
Using a “scale-out” storage controller solution like Nutanix ensures consistent high write performance even immediately following a node failure by eliminating the requirement for RAID style rebuilds which are disk intensive and can lead to “Double Disk Failures” and data loss.The replication of data being distributed across all nodes in the cluster ensures minimal impact to each Nutanix controller, ESXi host and the network while ensuring the data is re-protected as soon as possible.

Dealing with Team Members Who Derail Meetings
Start your meeting by saying something like, “My understanding of the purpose of this meeting is X; does anyone have a different understanding, or think we need to add anything?” Even if you called the meeting and set the agenda, this ensures that if people think other issues need to be addressed, they can say so, and have them considered for the agenda, rather than raising them as off-track items.

Microsoft Is Quietly Becoming A Major Player In The 'Cloud'
Microsoft is now the second largest cloud software provider in the world behind Salesforce (CRM). The company's cloud offerings are also a key reason the company's revenue is projected to grow 5% to 7% both this fiscal year and in FY2014 despite a continuing decline in global PC sales. The company does not receive many plaudits for its rapidly growing cloud offerings but they are a critical part of Microsoft's future growth prospects.

Quote for the day:

"Great achievement is usually born of great sacrifice, and is never the result of selfishness." -- Napoleon Hill

September 21, 2013

Experts praise Pentagon's march to security standards
Thwarting hackers is also behind the Pentagon's move to have all four branches of the military, defense agencies and overseas commands use the same network and security systems. The expected benefits include killing redundancies and making it easier to detect hacker-induced anomalies. The transition away from the Pentagon's current mishmash of technology unique to the various government entities is expected to take years. However, experts contacted by CSOonline said the outcome will likely justify the time and expense.

Google starts new health company to tackle aging
This is the latest project that takes Google away from its Internet search origins. The company is already developing driver-less cars and giant hot-air balloons that bring Wi-Fi to remote corners of the world. Wall Street sometimes gets unnerved by such projects because investors worry that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are not concentrating fully on the main, money-making parts of the company.

Microsoft OS Chief: One API to Rule Them All
"We really should have one silicon interface for all of our devices. We should have one set of developer APIs on all of our devices," said Terry Myerson, executive vice president of Microsoft's Operating Systems Engineering Group, during the company's meeting with financial analysts on Thursday. "And all of the apps we bring to end users should be available on all of our devices," he added.

Data Mining and Analysis Textbook (Free Download)
Mohammed J. Zaki, Computer Science Professor at RPI, and Wagner Meira Jr., Computer Science Professor at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, have written the textbook Data Mining and Analysis: Fundamental Concepts and Algorithms. The book is currently available as a PDF download. Based upon the chapters, the book looks very good. It contains large sections on data analysis, clustering, and classification. The final book will be published sometime in 2014.

Is Tableau the New Leader in BI?
There was a long list of features and new capabilities showcased. The demonstration of story points was the most compelling in my opinion. Interestingly, "story telling" is a key theme of QlikView.Next , announced last year and currently in beta. At the ASUG BusinessObjects user conference in Anaheim last week, SAP also showed the concept of story boards in its upcoming Lumira SP12 due in a few weeks. So far, the Tableau demonstration seemed the more robust.

Make Business Agility a Key Corporate Attribute
Today, companies must break away from the assumption of sustainable competitive advantage and embrace adaptable differentiation, i.e., develop an agility advantage. But what does this mean? Forrester defines business agility as the quality that allows an enterprise to embrace market and operational changes as a matter of routine.

New iOS 7 security hack and other grumbles
The latest version of the iPhone’s operating system currently offers a gaping hole in its old-fashioned passcode lockscreen. Jose Rodriguez...shared the technique with me. ...anyone can exploit the bug by swiping up on the lockscreen...and then opening the alarm clock. Holding the phone’s sleep button brings up the option to power it off.

The Science Behind What Naps do for Your Brain

Millions of Chinese workers continue to put their heads on their desks for a nap of an hour or so after lunch, for example, and daytime napping is common from India to Spain. ... Sleep experts have found that daytime naps can improve many things: increase alertness, boost creativity, reduce stress, improve perception, stamina, motor skills, and accuracy, enhance your sex life, aid in weight loss, reduce the risk of heart attack, brighten your mood and boost memory.

How the financial services sector uses big data analytics to predict client behaviour
The opportunity for the sector is to unlock the potential in the data through analytics and shape the strategy for business through reliable factual insight rather than intuition. Recognising that data is a significant corporate asset, a number of organisations are appointing chief data officers following pressure to police the integrity of the numbers as last year's Economist Special Report, "Data, Data Everywhere", put it.

Your story cards are limiting your agility
Storycards are lies, unless they are directly created BY a customer, an actual customer, not by a product owner/customer proxy. If stories are created by a product owner they are hypotheses, well educated guesses as to what they think the customer wants. Product Owners try to understand the mind of the customer but no one really knows what the market will do with a product or service until it is created.

Quote for the day:

"Management is nothing more than motivating other people." -- Lee Iacocca

September 20, 2013

Day in the life of a data scientist: investigate, collaborate, innovate
Shellman describes the lab’s innovation process as one that occurs rapidly, with working prototypes developed quickly for immediate feedback. The key to idea creation and implementation? Getting out and collaborating is the key, she says. Ironically, Shellman’s favorite tool for innovation and idea creation is pen and paper.

Cloud strategy: Power of the people
Despite the notion of all cloud services as “plug and play,” in reality, implementing major cloud deals—like ones in government, financial or telecommunications firms, for instance—requires real vertical industry expertise and skilled technology service professionals. Unlike when consumers buy cloud services, it’s not “all automated”—far from it. Experience and scale matter when you’re working with big enterprises and the US Federal government.

Gecko Is One Small Step For The Internet Of Things, One Huge Leap For Your Smartphone
The idea here is that the accelerometer-equipped Gecko connects to your smartphone via low energy Bluetooth to help you monitor the various things in your life, as well as bring gesture controls and triggers to your smartphone. With Gecko, the connectedness isn’t built into the devices themselves but can rather be applied to objects in the home through these accelerometer- and Bluetooth-based tags

When Developing Gamified Apps for Business, Avoid the Disruption of Processes at All Costs
Usability and user experience (UX) are core principles that guide functionality, interface design, and interactivity for mobile app and web designers. Gamified apps especially must meld directly into a workflow; If it hinders processes rather than optimizes, an entire gamification implementation may fail. A best bet would be to plant developers within the business environment to observe workers.

Home workers: Get out and meet people
"About a year ago I realized I was slipping into a routine that was keeping me isolated from the real world. I was happy working in my home office but I was missing vital interaction with others. That was not only less than ideal for me personally, but it wasn't helping in my work covering mobile tech. Besides work colleagues, I wasn't talking to folks enough to keep current with the tech people are using and why."

WAN vendor Ipanema Technologies sets cloud app performance platform
CAM has two parts: time evolution reports that paint a picture of how cloud applications are being consumed at certain sites over a period of time, and overview reports that detail where application performance is worst and the number of users accessing a particular application. The platform essentially lets companies provide Quality of Service to users, Piquer Durand said, even for applications operating outside the core network.

Steve Ballmer finally admits Microsoft blew it by focusing too much on Windows
Here's what he had to say, according to Business Insider: "If there's one thing I regret, there was a period in the early 2000s when we were so focused on what we had to do around Windows that we weren't able to redeploy talent to the new device form factor called the phone." Although he admitted the company's error in focusing too heavily on Windows, he's being a bit disingenuous here.

Experts, users weigh in on OpenPower's open source data center systems
"Rarely is a declining platform rescued from the abyss by such [initiatives as this consortium]," Treadway said. "The IBM Power Architecture, like all RISC-based systems, has been losing relevance for years, and it's unlikely that any open source move will garner more than a niche response. This is particularly true with OpenPower, which lacks an open governance model on the core technology."

Business -- not IT -- should make the case for cloud
The true value of cloud computing -- or any technology, for that matter -- is its ability to make the business function in ways that can maximize its growth and value. This means allowing the business to move in new and innovative directions to capture new markets, or to keep up with the market by growing as quickly as the market will allow. For this to work, you need to use technology in agile and scalable ways. Typically, you can't do that with the existing set of technologies and approaches you use today.

What You Need to Maintain Effective Agile Software Development
It is a disservice to the client to impose upon them the requirement of a perfect plan or the acceptance of an undesired result, if an alternative is possible. In the real world, knowledge of the business is dispersed among many stakeholders, concepts suffer from varying degrees of vagueness, and the desired outcome often begins to crystallize after the work has begun. It is therefore more cost-effective to have the right technical talent that can function in an interactive environment with the stakeholder, and adapt the work to an evolving plan.

Quote for the day:

"If you can dream it you can do it." -- Walt Disney

September 19, 2013

How software-defined infrastructure shapes compute resources
"If you're running a data center today, you're big enough for a software-defined data center," said Poulin, who will speak on SDDCs at the Data Center World Fall 2013 conference in Florida. "If you have one rack or a small closet, you're more likely looking for a way to not run a data center anymore, and outsourcing is attractive." But software-defined infrastructure is in its infancy, and will likely evolve much like virtualization once did.

Security Researchers Create Undetectable Hardware Trojans
Hardware trojans have been the subject of considerable research since at least 2005 when the U.S. Department of Defense publicly expressed concerns over the military's reliance on integrated circuits manufactured abroad, Paar said. Often, the individual circuit blocks in a single microchip are designed by different parties, manufactured by an offshore foundry, packaged by a separate company and distributed by yet another vendor.

Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle Adoption: Why and How
Not only is the SDL integrated into a company’s internal development lifecycle, but it should also be applied to all software applications that are used by the company, no matter the development source. The SDL is a framework for the entire development process. Companies should require the use of an SDL which meets or exceeds the guidance in ISO/IEC 27034-1.

Understanding Samsung Knox
The Knox container feature is a second, secure Android environment within the normal operating system. The secure sub-operating system has its own separate home screen, launcher, applications and widgets. All the data and applications stored in the container are completely isolated from the rest of the operating system. No application or process inside the container can interact or communicate with any process outside of it and vice-versa.

Hey, CIOs: In a BYOD world, your new job is service provider
According to Matthew Finnie, CTO of Interoute, ”The idea that people are going to give up the freedom they have with the smartphone — I think that battle is completely lost.” Instead of “retrenching,” though, CIOs need to “define what’s useful and what’s critical for [them] to control.” He agreed with Short: The new role of the CIO is “almost like a mini service provider.”

Cybersecurity Field Not Ready to be Professionalized, Study Finds
“One of the things that gave us pause was that when an occupation professionalizes, it erects barriers to entry,” said Dr. Ronald Sanders, a vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton and one of eight members of the committee producing the report. “On one hand, it improves the quality of people who enter the profession, but it also discourages some people from entering the field. At a time when the field is evolving and supply has not kept pace with demand, to professionalize the entire field would likely be counterproductive.”

Improving the Big Data Toolkit
Hadoop 2.0, said Merv Adrian, an analyst at Gartner, is “an important step,” making the technology “a far more versatile data operating environment.” The new version of Hadoop, he said, can handle larger data sets faster than its predecessor and it opens the door to analyzing data in real-time streams. So far, Hadoop has been used mostly to divvy up huge sets of data for analysis, but only in batches, not streams. The new Hadoop has also been tweaked to work more easily with traditional database tools, like SQL.

7 Biggest IT Compliance Headaches and How CIOs Can Cure Them
As if IT departments didn't have enough to worry about these days. They also have to ensure that the organization is in compliance with various industry and federal regulations (PCI, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA) designed to keep sensitive customer data safe. An increasingly difficult task in today's decentralized, mobile, app-filled world. It's enough to give a CIO or CTO a headache.

Meditate for More Profitable Decisions
Meditation has become an increasingly popular practice amongst the C-suite elite. And, with CEOs such as Rupert Murdoch (News Corp); Bill Ford (Ford Motor Company); Rick Goings (Tupperware); and Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com) all touting its benefits, executive coaches are picking up on the trend introducing mindful techniques to programmes to calm the mind’s “chatter”, assist focus and manage stress.

Agile exploratory software testing: Why IT inefficiency pays off
Exploratory testing involves the admin fully and continuously in the development process. Testers don't just react to massive chunks of developer code; they act proactively to think of ways to break it. The most daring extension of the Agile exploratory testing approach is to the Agile side of operational app testing: Agile exploratory DevOps. The administrator fights fires and actively thinks of ways to break the code before problems happen. It requires "operational sandboxes" in which to test.

Quote for the day:

"Perfection isn't attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence" -- Vince Lombardi

September 18, 2013

Data Scientists Talk Privacy Worries
Data scientists working in the healthcare and life science fields showed the greatest support (92%) for a code of ethics. "Out of all the industries, life science and healthcare is the one, I think, that is most advanced in setting up frameworks for using data in an ethical way," Smith said. Overall, the survey results didn't surprise Smith. "It's really a confirmation of what we would have expected to see," he noted. "These are people who have their hands working with data in and out every day. They understand the power of data and the importance of it being used in an appropriate fashion."

China-based hacking group behind hundreds of attacks on U.S. companies
Haley said members of Hidden Lynx appear loosely organized into two teams: an A-team, comprising a relatively small number of elite hackers with access to sophisticated tools like Trojan Naid; and a B-team, which appears comprised mainly of foot soldiers responsible for carrying out large attacks using Backdoor Moudoor and similar tools. The elite hackers are usually deployed for special operations involving a high-degree of skill and secrecy, Haley noted.

How digitisation is shaking up IT outsourcing
Ridder said IT departments should be proactive and approach the business departments to help them buy the IT they need in the correct way rather than just block it. He said a lack of involvement from IT sourcing experts could present major risks to the business. For example, although buying software as a service (SaaS) might appear less expensive, it might cost more because it could mean falling short of the number of licences needed to trigger a discount for another application.

Challenges & solutions - Architecture of a Modern Web Application - Part 1
On the other hand, end users use web applications on myrid of devices, ranging from desktops, laptops, tablets, HDTV, printers, phone display and smart phones. All these devices come in variety of screen sizes, native frameworks and browser compatibilities for CSS3, JavaScript & Html5. This leaves web application development teams in making variety of decisions regarding application compatibility, performance, usability and maintainability. Let's discuss device and server side code bases separately.

Look at Risk Before Leaping Into BYOD, Report Cautions
"If you're going to put any technology on any device that you don't control, and you don't think you're not going to create some liability for your company, you're wrong," Gula said. Any BYOD management program, however -- even one weak on risk management -- may be better than no program at all. "There isn't an option for companies not to have a mobile strategy," said Caleb Barlow, an application, data and mobile security director for IBM.

IT driving UK economy as skills gap widens
Rachel Pinto, research manager at UKCES, said: “The digital sector contributes nearly £69 billion to the economy. It is also one of the most productive sectors with a growth rate since the recession three times above the average. “But the impact of IT specialists goes much further than this - of the total 1.1 million IT specialists in the UK, just under half are employed in the digital sector, with the rest most likely to be employed in finance and professional services, manufacturing or the public sector."

Banking CISOs Evolve Risk Control Mechanisms to Secure Cloud
While risks are obvious, Dr K Harsha, Head-IT, HKM Technologies, finds that the risk of financial data being hacked is huge for banks to go in for the cloud, where it is easy to hack banking and financial cloud base applications. The key aspects for CISOs of the banking and financial segment to adhere to in a cloud model are: to customise the application as per cloud capabilities, have strong applications even though end point vulnerabilities exist, ensure frequent reference of logs, and notification alerts for configurations.

Case study: 3 heavyweights give gamification a go
But now companies are gamifying internal applications to engage employees. Burke expects internal efforts to overtake consumer-engagement uses in the next year or so. By 2015, 40% of global 1000 organizations will use gamification as the primary mechanism to transform business operations, Gartner predicts. "We see gamification being leveraged for change management," says Burke. "We see that as a big opportunity."

Canvas Inspection using Chrome DevTools
Sometimes you want to capture the instructions sent to a canvas context and step through them one by one. Fortunately there is a new Canvas Inspection feature in Chrome’s DevTools that lets us do just that! In this article Paul Lewis shows you how to use this feature to start debugging your canvas work. The inspector supports both 2D and WebGL contexts, so no matter which one you're using, you should be able to get useful debugging information straight away.

The insight driven organisation
Why do business leaders struggle so much with incorporating qualitative judgement into their innovation decisions? Our research uncovered two main causes. First is what can be called Schumpeter’s bias. We all pay lip service to Schumpeter’s vision of the lone and creative entrepreneur. This image is so entrenched that people unconsciously tend to believe that the magic of an insight is not replicable. Many business leaders believe that we depend on “individual” genetic talent. But scientific evidence of the last 30 years proves just the opposite.

Quote for the day:

"The quality of a man's life is in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence, regardless of chosen field of endeavor." -- V. Lombardi

September 17, 2013

The Human Body is the New Password
A few weeks ago Motorola demonstrated a so called password pill. A vitamin pill that contains a computer chip which transmits an encrypted signal to identify the individual. Google recently filed a patent to recognize faces in a unique way. Normal facial recognition software can easily be fooled by keeping a picture in front of the camera. Google has therefore found a way that the static portraits can be broken, simply by winking, “at least one of a blink gesture, a wink gesture, an ocular movement, a smile gesture, a frown gesture, a tongue protrusion gesture, an open mouth gesture, an eyebrow movement, a forehead wrinkle gesture, and a nose wrinkle gesture.”

The future bank will be the one with biggest (inter)network
Banks are very poor at collaboration – apart from creating their cooperative SWIFT – and many areas of banking today will not exist in the future without collaboration. We need to make collaboration work to survive. If you look at how the world works today, everything has ‘crowd’ in it somewhere with crowdsourcing and crowdfunding being two that really apply to the banking world. This is why we will need far more collaboration in the future as you cannot work or stand alone in a globally connected world.

With No Camera Required Armband Converts Gestures Into Controls
The Tom Cruise action-thriller Minority Report, made in 2002 and set in 2054, envisioned a world where people spoke to computers and controlled them with a swipe of the wrist. We only had to wait ten years for the science fiction imaginings to become a reality, with gesture recognition, and more recently wearable tech, blurring the lines between digital interfaces and human commands to making communicating with machines easier than ever before.

Disrupting the Consultants: Clayton Christensen and Friends Sound the Alarm
Now, more than ever before, companies want to connect to the originator, the source of an idea - instead of going with organizational middlemen. Thought-leadership translates to market leadership. Some of the big firms are hiring these gurus to harness their I.P. but the list of independent, disruptive gurus is growing fast.

Get an Inside Look at Microsoft Datacenters and Hardware
Have you ever wondered what a datacenter looks like? Maybe you saw a datacenter 5 years ago. I can tell you first hand a lot has changed in datacenter construction and implementation in the last 5 years. There are a couple of great videos on YouTube that show off a few of the things that Microsoft is doing with cloud computing hardware and datacenters.

Cybersecurity business booming in Silicon Valley
"It's a multibillion-dollar business in and of itself," said John Grady, a security specialist with the International Data Corporation, of the criminal enterprises. "So the industry, to keep up on the defensive side, has just skyrocketed." Although HP doesn't reveal how much money it gets from its cybersecurity products, which are designed to discourage attacks and minimize losses when breaches occur, the amount is a tiny portion of its revenue.

Hybrid Databases Gaining Favor for Enterprise Big Data Analytics
“Traditional databases do not go away,” said Sastry Malldi, the chief architect for StubHub. ... The more unstructured data coming into the company, the more structured you have to become in dealing with all those sources. StubHub uses a four-layer data approach overseen by a data management umbrella. The data and data management reside in eBay’s private infrastructure cloud. ... The hybrid database will be the goal of the enterprise data architect for years to come.

Postgres Gets Even More Reliability, High Availability, Several Developer-Friendly Features
PostgreSQL 9.3 comes with Fast Fail-over and streaming-only Remastering as well as many developer-focussed features such as materialized views, auto-updateable views, many features for JSON data-type and more. ... Features include: Optional ability to Checksum data pages and report corruption; Fast Failover option for Standby servers: enables sub-second switch from master to replica; and Streaming-Only Remastering: easier, faster reconfiguration of cascading replicas after failover

Valve CEO: Why Linux is the future of gaming
"Linux is the future of gaming for gamers on the client as well, because, besides Microsoft moving to a more locked-in style of computing, "Open systems were advancing much faster. The old console guys are not competitive, and there's huge tension in proprietary systems." For example, Newell said, "It took us six months to get one update through the Apple store. Closed systems are at odds with the evolution of gaming." So, Valve has been bringing its Steam games to Linux. There are now 198 Steam games running on Linux. The issues of bringing the games to Linux have been solved.

Innovation under the covers
There are a number of reasons for what I call "innovation under the covers". First, every firm wants to be viewed as an innovator, so it pays to talk about innovation externally, regardless of what you are actually doing internally. Second, innovation is risky, so rather than make a big, public bet that may fail, executives are often willing to allow innovation to happen, but in a quiet, discrete way in case it doesn't pan out.

Quote for the day:

"The leadership instinct you are born with is the backbone. You develop the funny bone and the wishbone that go with it." -- Elaine Agather