Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

May 22, 2014

Oracle set to launch in-memory database option
The in-memory option will speed up both analytic and transaction processing workloads, Oracle has said. In-memory databases place information in RAM, rather than reading it off of slower disk storage, providing those performance gains. Oracle has had in-memory technology for years, such as TimesTen, but hasn't made the approach a central part of its database strategy until now. During Oracle's third-quarter earnings call in March, Ellison said the in-memory option could be launched as late as August, but the webcast's timing could indicate the company's development teams are ahead of schedule.A

Enterprise architects: Give them a bigger role in smaller firms
Misconceptions about the place of an enterprise architecture in smaller companies may also be down to much of the literature and research on the subject. "Most of what you read about enterprise architecture speaks to larger organisations and makes assumptions about the resources that they're able to commit," Burke said. "So small businesses need to be both realistic and selective about where they are going to focus their energy, because even large organisations struggle with building a full-out enterprise architecture." Burke said maturity in this area across organisations in general is relatively low.

Is it really a tech bubble, or is it something else?
People dislike Uber, not because some founder is going to become a billionaire; the discontent comes from the visible disparity between those who have it and those who don’t. Google buses get rocks and eggs thrown at them mostly because they are a reminder of digital feudalism. As an industry, we are very fortunate; and that is why it is important to remember why we need to have compassion and understanding about the fears of the rest of the world. We need to remember that our actions now intersect and influence those who are not of our industry. Trying to be in their shoes isn’t a bad place to start.

Glenn Greenwald: how the NSA tampers with US-made internet routers
The NSA routinely receives – or intercepts – routers, servers and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers. The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal and sends them on. The NSA thus gains access to entire networks and all their users. ... Eventually, the implanted device connects back to the NSA. The report continues: "In one recent case, after several months a beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction called back to the NSA covert infrastructure. This call back provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network."

Internet of Everything in the Public Sector: Generating Value in an Era of Change
IoE brings these elements together through standards-based IP networks, and Cisco projects that it will generate a staggering $19 trillion in value over the next 10 years. Public sector organizations can capture as much as $4.6 trillion of this Value at Stake (http://bit.ly/1aSGIzn). Already, some forward-thinking organizations — federal, state, and local governments; healthcare organizations; educational institutions; utilities; and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) — are seizing the opportunity. They are using IoE-enabled solutions to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and, most important, improve the lives of citizens.

Hyperconvergence on the horizon for enterprises
Enterprise cloud computing is finally becoming more enterprise-focused. IBM's acquisition of SoftLayer signaled their entry into the enterprise cloud market, offering a bare-metal option that's firmly directed toward businesses. They're competing with Amazon, though not on price, says SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby; instead, it's their "enterprise-y" approach that marks IBM's renewed cloud efforts. Senior news writer Beth Pariseau discusses her interview with Crosby and his take on the cloud computing market in this installment of the Modern Infrastructure podcast, along with discussing who might turn out to be Amazon's closest rival.

American Express CEO Ken Chenault: 'There's a $25 trillion opportunity'
Here's what's key. If we look at how mobile devices are used, people who use mobile devices in the shoppers' journey are 40% more likely to convert to sales. Think about how people use information, how they leverage recommendations they get from social media sites. The key is to understand the different elements of the commerce journey. We want to be where our customers are. We want to deliver them benefits in the way they want to have those benefits presented to them. It goes back to a key message I give in my organization: This is an environment where you innovate or die. We want to be the company that will put us out of business.

Sizing Up Candidates for Cultural Fit Throughout the Hiring Process
The onboarding process is a time to ensure new hires receive the training and education needed for them to get up to speed, but it’s also the perfect time to stress the company’s cultural values. Folding a mentorship program into onboarding efforts can be a great way to connect new hires more fully to their co-workers and the company culture at large. Depending on the company and the staff, mentors might need to receive incentives. After all, mentoring a new hire is no small feat, so bonuses like extra vacation days, financial incentives and even free lunches can sweeten the pot. Great mentors can not only get new employees up to speed faster. They can also give new hires an on-the-ground perspective of how the company culture plays out in everyday office life.

Big banks' legacy IT systems could kill them
Sam Woods, a director in the Bank of England's Prudential Regulation Authority, recently told an investigation into banking IT disasters that UK bank IT systems are far from robust. “I feel we are a very long away from being able to sit here with confidence and say the UK banks' IT systems are robust,” Woods told the committee at a Northern Ireland Affairs Committee at Westminster. Computer Weekly’s senior banking source agrees. “I think all banks have similar risks but RBS has suffered more than most. There is a fine between being just OK and just not OK," he says. "The pressure on cost after 2008 has been significant and firms are also having to pay out large fines, compensation or cover trading losses, which does not help.

Restify and Mobilize Your Data
We examine two technologies that significantly reduce time to market. Executable Schema(builds on MDD and Convention over Configuration) creates a RESTful API and multi-table UI from existing schemas - literally in minutes. Declarative Behavior for logic and security bring spreadsheet-like power and simplicity - backed up by a fully programmable JavaScript model. In this piece, we’ll briefly review existing key technologies, to build on their advances and to benefit from lessons learned in the marketplace. We’ll then provide specifics for Executable Schema and Declarative Behavior.

Quote for the day:

"It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety." -- Isaac Asimov

May 21, 2014

CFOs get schooled on hope and hype of big data analytics
How many chiefs does it take to invest in big data? If you haven't already, it's time to add CFOs to that list. "We used to see big data as a CIO-IT cost consolidation problem. In fact, the debate has completely shifted. It's all about revenue, growth and enhancement," said Jo Tango, co-founder and partner at venture capital firm Kepha Partners. "I would argue [that], in the big data age, CFOs have even more power and leverage as the people who write checks."

Reactive Cloud Actors: An Evolvable Web of Events
In case of a Reactive actors, the sender simply publishes an event signifying the business process accomplished and other actors choose to subscribe to such events and perform their actions. In this case, actors can evolve independently and business processes modified with only change to a single or a handful of actors. This results in higher level of decoupling and is a good fit for developing both analytics and transactional systems on the horizontal scale provided by the cloud. Implementations of Reactive Actors already exist in the industry. Fred George's body of work on Reactive MicroServices is a prime example. Amazon Kinesis can be viewed as a coarsely granular Reactive Actor framework.

Security's future belongs to open source
The proof that open source, properly applied, is available. Studies, such as the one recently done by Coverity, have found that open-source programs have fewer errors per thousand lines of code than its proprietary brothers. And, it's hard to ignore the Communications-Electronics Security Group (CESG), the group within the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) that assesses operating systems and software for security issues, when they said that that while no end-user operating system is as secure as they'd like it to be, Ubuntu 12.04 is the most secure desktop. On the other hand, the mere existence of Microsoft's monthly Patch Tuesday says everything most of us need to know about how "secure" proprietary software is.

Top Initiatives to Improve IT
Management consultancy McKinsey & Co. surveyed business executives from across functions to find out their attitudes about IT. One question asked what initiatives would be most important to improving IT performance. More than 738 executives responded, and the results were published in late March. McKinsey’s takeaway: “Surprisingly, more IT executives than business leaders see changing IT leadership as a priority to improve IT performance.” Here are McKinsey’s top nine initiatives to improve IT performance based on the results.

How To Fix Windows Server Network Performance Problems
More often than not, the network performance problems are the result of a Windows security feature. By default, Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 digitally sign SMB packets. This digital signature helps to protect against spoofing, but it adds some overhead to the traffic stream. You can get rid of this overhead and improve performance by disabling the SMB packet signing feature. Keep in mind however, that disabling SMB signing does reduce security, so you should only use this fix if you are experiencing disruptive performance or reliability problems.

Businesses increase IT spending at fastest rate for eight years, say IT leaders
The survey shows that after five years of cost cutting, CIOs' number one priority has shifted to providing their business with an efficient IT service.Two-thirds of IT leaders are prioritising projects that make money for the business in an indication that more companies are focusing on investment in IT for growth rather than to save money. And more CIOs are more optimistic that their IT budgets will continue to grow than at any time since the survey began in 2005, with some 44% expecting more budget increases next year, the research revealed.

AT&T hacker wants government to pay him $13M
"I want history to record that I made an honest and public attempt to get reasonable compensation," from the government, Auernheimer said in comments via email to Computerworld. "Whatever I do in the future, I want people to know that I tried peaceful civil actions first." The U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey in March 2013 sentenced Auernheimer to 41 months in prison for violating provisions of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Last month, the United State Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit vacated that sentence on a technicality, holding that the case had been pursued in the wrong venue.

Hybrid strategies common as organizations strive for cloud GRC
Banks, for example, are required by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act to have well-rounded third-party risk management, according to VanSickel. This includes initial due diligence on the third party's history, then extensive research on the security controls and services provided by the company, he said. Additionally, the organization procuring cloud services will need audit capabilities. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and Payment Card Industry customers need to recertify yearly to ensure they are still complying with regulations, and the cloud provider should be able to meet these requirements.

China retaliates, nixes Windows 8 on government PCs
According to the Xinhua News Agency, an official press arm of the People's Republic, Windows 8 has been barred from government, but not private, PCs. "It's a good sound bite for the Chinese government, it goes well as a response to the DOJ action, and if sales are low -- even if they eventually use it -- they'll have a statement to back it up," said Michael Silver, an analyst with Gartner, in an email reply to questions. Silver referred to yesterday's charges by the U.S. Department of Justiceleveled against five Chinese hackers with links to the People's Liberation Army (PLA), China's military. The DOJ accused the five of breaking into numerous U.S. companies' networks and stealing trade secrets and intellectual property.

5 Ways Your Business Can Benefit from Agile Engineering Practices Today
The key is the word ‘process’. It’s tech stack agnostic. And the key to getting the full benefit of Agile Engineering Practices is having the diligence to uphold a certain minimum level of process discipline when things get hairy. It’s like exercising. If you exercise 5 times a week when you’re on vacation and 1 time per week when you have a tough work week, then in actuality you exercise once per week. If you practice pairing and TDD when you have no deadlines and throw Agile out the window once you have a tight deadline, then you’re not diligently practicing the process of Agile. Five specific benefits that businesses can gain by using Agile Engineering Practices are:

Quote for the day:

"Your future is created by what you do today, not tomorrow" -- Robert Kiyosaki

May 20, 2014

eBay Shifts to Water-Cooled Doors to Tame High-Density Loads
The Motivair doors use high-efficiency EC (electronically commutated) fans, which mean the overall power usage (12.8kW vs 11kW for the in-row units) was minimal. The system also uses less energy because it can use warm water, working at a water temperature of at 60 degrees rather than the 45 degrees seen in many chiller systems. “We thought the rear doors were expensive, but when you added the six racks back into the row, it paid for itself,” said Nelson. The cost scenario also worked because eBay had pre-engineered the space to support water cooling. Nelson believes that major data centers are approaching the limits of conventional air cooling, and sees water cooling as critical to future advances in high-density equipment.

The “rush syndrome”: How it affects your health and your job
Technology feeds the illusion that multitasking is a skill we should learn and use consistently. But a notable research study, conducted by Clifford Nass of Stanford University, shows just the opposite. People who try to do several things at once do all of them less well than those who focus on one task at a time. Jumping from one thing to another doesn’t save time — it costs time. Every time you switch tasks, you have to readjust your brain and refocus your attention. For example, you’re writing an important presentation when that ever-present “ping” signals an incoming e-mail. You switch into email mode, maybe even take time to answer, and when you switch back to the presentation, you can’t remember your last important thought.

Finland's 'safe harbour for data' becomes reality with funding for Sweden-free cable
Announcing the grant approval today, Finland's communications minister and "midwife" of the cable, Krista Kiuru, stressed Finland's independence. "Our geopolitical location is based both on geography and on decisions that we make ourselves. We ourselves must first have the courage to develop Finland into a significant safe harbour of information, where companies and countries can safely place their critical data," Kiuru said. "For this reason I proposed the inclusion of a definition of policy on the cable already in last year's framework agreement, on whose basis the preparations have now been brought to a conclusion. With these kinds of actions we significantly strengthen the image of our country as a concentration of data traffic."

What is DevOps really?
Although the term is now being treated as if it were a marketing buzzword like “cloud” and “big data”, there is a real grassroots initiative behind the hype that grew out of some good ideas generated by a few smart people working on application delivery. They went on to develop these ideas until they did real, concrete, awesome things. Others saw how successful these new teamwork methods were, and tried to figure out shortcut formulas to get there, without fully understanding the original ideas. This has caused problems and confusion because it is impossible to implement DevOps practices without understanding and putting in practice the underlying ideas.

US charges Chinese military officers with cyber espionage
The targets of the alleged cyber espionage have been identified as Westinghouse Electric, US Steel, Alcoa Inc, Allegheny Technologies, SolarWorld and the US Steelworkers Union. The FBI said the hacking activities of the accused from 2006 to 2014 had caused "significant losses" at the five companies and probably many more besides. The stolen documents allegedly include solar panel pricing strategies and designs for components of a nuclear plant. The indictment alleges that one Chinese state-owned enterprise involved in trade litigation against some of the US target companies hired the unit to build a secret database to hold corporate intelligence, according to IDG News.

PSUs are Open to Cloud Beyond IaaS, PaaS and SaaS
The Public Sector has increasingly started adopting cloud computing for its benefits such as efficient and effective management and delivery of net centric services. Additionally, by migrating to the cloud, public-sector organizations will be able to free up IT expenditure for re-investment in mission-enabling activities or national objectives such as deficit reduction. The Cloud G initiative which went live recently is an important step in this direction. This will now offer infrastructure, platform, storage, and software-as-a-service for the Indian public sector. Also to note, adopting cloud infrastructure is important but instant availability of the information through cloud infrastructure is another important piece that cannot be ignored.

The Value of Chief Strategy Officers
The CSO, ideally, has deep knowledge of internal operations (usually an insider, but an outsider can succeed also) and shouldn’t be isolated from that after taking the job. “I’d say the CSO is more external-facing but with deep knowledge of internal operations. And so this goes back to what makes a successful CSO — I think the bad ones are the ones who sit in the ivory towers and pontificate … the really good ones have probably come from inside the company,” Stroh said. “They’re operational- or functionally focused, and what I mean by that is that they’ve run something. They’ve run operations, they’ve run the call center, they’ve run product development, they’ve run marketing.... So they’re eating their own dog food when developing strategy because they have to live with it.”

Cue the Data Storytellers: The Data Industry’s Next Big Stars
Good stories connect with emotion, surprise, concrete imagery, and narrative. Many books have gone into this, such as “Writing for Story” by Jon Franklin, “Understanding Comics” by Scott McCloud, and the relatively recent “Made to Stick” by the Heath brothers. The best of the data storytellers will add to what they already know by looking into storytelling’s rich legacy for inspiration and technique — including genres that have never been mentioned with data in the same breath. Folk songs, for one. Ramblin’ Jack Elliot’s “912 Greens” starts out with adventure and ends in the comfort of community.

Why IT needs to drive the risk conversation
The problem might not lie in some stubborn dislike by technology professionals for innovative new products. The problem, CIOs and other experts agree, is that most organizations don't have a realistic, balanced or mature system for evaluating and making decisions about technology risk. Especially the risk that always comes with implementing something new. "Somebody, typically in a line of business, has some SaaS product they want to use, and they provide a business case for it: 'Here's all the good stuff that can result from the use of this. It'll make my numbers. I can access it from anywhere,'" says Jay Heiser, an analyst at Gartner.

Cisco will lead SDN and win IT, Chambers says
"You're going to see a brutal, brutal consolidation of the IT industry," he said. Many other industries will also consolidate, and enterprises will have to transform themselves and adopt end-to-end architectures like Cisco's to stay competitive, he said. The company is directly taking on SDN (software-defined networking) in the form of so-called "white box" networking hardware with an overlay of software such as the OpenFlow open-source protocol or VMware's NSX. Cisco will win with a combination of its ACI (Application Centric Infrastructure) platform with hardware built from a combination of third-party and Cisco-developed silicon, he said. Traditional, standalone networking equipment will be sidelined, he said.

Quote for the day:

"Nobody raises his own reputation by lowering others" -- Anonymous

May 19, 2014

InfoSec shake-up in full swing
After the Symantec “bombshell”, the rest of the AV industry spent the past week scurrying around trying to stop a total erosion of confidence in their products. The reaction of Kaspersky was typical of the industry – they said that although signature scanning is now pretty hopeless, AV products comprise several more layers which provide protection. The reality however, is that it does not matter how many layers AV has – it simply does not stop nearly enough malware. Symantec have pulled their fingers out the dyke – pressures to change are fast becoming a flood. AV is based on an outdated premise of attempting to prevent malware infections.

The digital CIO: How to be a digital innovator
Rather than segmenting the IT budget into support, operations and capital investment, Lambert suggested CIOs take a holistic approach. “You need to look at IT not from a budget point of view, but from an organisational point of view,” said Lambert. “If operations and support are good enough, leave it this year, and put the money into innovation.” If there is not enough funding to do the work straight away, fund a pilot project, he suggested. But don’t use pilots to test technology improvements, pilot business improvements. “If you don’t manage this process, you tend to drift down from the top strategic projects to the bottom operational and support programmes,” he said.

Lessons Learned & Some Valuable Tips on a Data Center Move
Like many organizations, its IT operation was born with a mainframe computer in makeshift space in one of the hospital building, retrofitted to house the computer systems. They continued to expand over many years, growing to over 2500 square feet, plus additional 600 square feet in other buildings. Faced with the need to expand once again they considered several options and finally chose to design, build and move to a new 4,000-square-foot data center facility. Raritan executives had the opportunity to speak with Greg Rutledge, Data Center Manager, and Trey Jones, Director of IT Infrastructure Services, who were both involved in this major project from beginning to end. They shared the valuable lessons they learned and we share them with you in this e-Book.

Architects and Innovation – Part 1
As architect teams begin to consider their engagement model, they must include their approach to innovation. Unfortunately, though most architects would like to immediately create innovative change in their companies, there are a lot of roadblocks to getting your team’s engagement model connected to the ideation process for next generation business models. Many businesses do not formally have an idea/innovation management process at all and in others architects (if they even have titled architects) are considered to be IT order takers and not business drivers. So buyer beware the process of ‘getting involved’ may actually turn into having to create a cultural change across the entire company instead.

Why IT needs to drive the risk conversation
The problem might not lie in some stubborn dislike by technology professionals for innovative new products. The problem, CIOs and other experts agree, is that most organizations don't have a realistic, balanced or mature system for evaluating and making decisions about technology risk. Especially the risk that always comes with implementing something new. "Somebody, typically in a line of business, has some SaaS product they want to use, and they provide a business case for it: 'Here's all the good stuff that can result from the use of this. It'll make my numbers. I can access it from anywhere,'" says Jay Heiser, an analyst at Gartner.

Shaping the Future of Banking
IBM and DBS Bank are partnering to engage IBM Watson™ cognitive computing innovation to deliver a next-generation banking experience for clients. The collaboration with IBM is a recent initiative by DBS Bank to harness big data for enhancing customer experience by providing precise, customized, and quality actionable insights for meeting the needs of customers. David Gledhill, managing director and head of group technology and operations, and Olivier Crespin, COO, consumer bank and wealth management, at DBS Bank explain how Watson can enable DBS Bank to transform the customer experience and help shape the future of banking.

Information Democracy vs Information Anarchy
Much of the recent growth in the business intelligence market has been in the area of "data discovery" tools that take advantage of in-memory technology to allow users to quickly mash up data from multiple sources and explore it interactively and visually without having to create new "queries" for each step. These tools are often enthusiastically adopted by business users as a reaction against the red tape and restrictions of central IT organizations, which are perceived as information dictatorships where access to data is concentrated in the hands of a few. Although this data discovery has empowered business users in new ways, it has also introduced new dangers, in the form of Information Anarchy as defined by Liautaud

Is enterprise IT falling behind as business strategy turns outside-in?
A lot of change has occurred and a lot more remains. US-based firms are more outside-in than UK-based firms, and physical goods industries tend to be changing more than information-intensive, but heavily regulated, industries such as financial services and healthcare. But clearly, the most notable result of this exercise is the fact that the business strategy scores are slightly – but meaningfully – higher than the IT management results. This is consistent with our view that enterprise IT is often the most inside-out part of the modern firm, and that sales, marketing, product design and other parts of the business are more inclined to have an instinctive outside-in orientation.

Cisco CEO tells Obama that NSA spying hits tech sales
"We simply cannot operate this way, our customers trust us to be able to deliver to their doorsteps products that meet the highest standards of integrity and security," Chambers wrote in the letter to Obama, ... "We understand the real and significant threats that exist in this world, but we must also respect the industry's relationship of trust with our customers." A Cisco spokesman confirmed Sunday that the letter had been sent to Obama. Referring to the reports, including a photograph of what appeared to be a Cisco package being tampered with, Chambers said if the allegations are true, the actions will weaken confidence in the ability of technology companies to deliver products worldwide.

Architecting your organization for the cloud
While cloud computing has seen widespread adoption, many organizations still see cloud-based services as something to be kept at arms length rather than as an integral part of an organization’s extended IT architecture. This not only results in missed opportunities but also means that applications and services are architected without taking the wider area network into account. Aimed at heads of infrastructure in enterprise organizations, this paper considers how organizations can benefit from aspects of technology that lie beyond the corporate boundary — that is, the cloud — without being hampered by sometimes-artificial technological, organizational, and financial constraints.

Quote for the day:

"There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience had brought it home." -- John Stuart Mill

May 18, 2014

APIs one drop of glue that bonds next generation enterprise architecture
“What the cloud did was act as a foundational piece to be able to rework all the architecture, and now things like DevOps, identity and mobile devices are kicking off this secondary wave,” said Eric Norlin, founder and curator of GlueCon. Norlin says this next wave will be defined by a more agile enterprise. “There is not as strict oversight from a CIO or CTO. That oversight begins to erode under this new architecture.” The mode of operation is speed; including servers instantly spun up, continuous coding, and launches happening live. “The environment is so dynamic and your ability to scale the architecture is out of this world,” said Norlin.

The SaaS Metrics Maturity Model
Becoming a Metrics-driven SaaS Business is no easy task. It takes time, commitment and plenty of customers. However, the financial rewards of moving beyond standard SaaS financial metrics to SaaS customer success metrics and ultimately to sophisticated predictive analytics are significant. Each step toward SaaS metrics greatness builds upon the last. The stages of development can be classified into a natural progression of increasing SaaS business understanding from financial stability to operational measurability to revenue predictability outlined at the very beginning of this series. These stages define a SaaS Metrics Maturity Model that provides a SaaS metrics roadmap along with benchmarks ...

7 Keys to Delivering Better Applications Faster
Instead of dividing tasks based on specialties, project work should be divided based on user stories, a term used in scrum or agile development methodologies to refer to a specific feature or piece of functionality written in in the everyday language of the end user (one format is "As a, I wantso that."). These stories should be developed by one or more business engineers as a whole. This way, every business engineer develops a full working piece of functionality each sprint rather than working on a certain activity. In the process, they're able to better focus on the business solution (see point #1) and deliver the best solution, versus simply completing his/her assigned task.

The Rise of the Full-Stack Architect
Don’t practice drive-by architecting – nothing irks developers more than an architect that designs a system, provides all the specifications, drops the finished docs on their poor heads and disappears, leaving them to suffer from the consequences of the poor choices. You need to see your architecture live in the running code, solving problems. Nothing makes me happier than developers gobbling up the new architecture and moving to it as fast and they can because it addresses their long standing problems. As a colleague of mine would say ‘the devil is in the pudding’ – if the system using your architecture is not faster, more scalable, more maintainable, your architecture sucks.

Patterns for Asynchronous MVVM Applications: Data Binding
One of the first things you have to consider when introducing async and await to the MVVM pattern is identifying which parts of your solution need the UI threading context. Windows platforms are serious about UI components being accessed only from the UI thread that owns them. Obviously, the view is entirely tied to the UI context. I also take the stand in my applications that anything linked to the view via data binding is tied to the UI context. Recent versions of WPF have loosened this restriction, allowing some sharing of data between the UI thread and background threads

Big data brings new power toopen-source intelligence
First, the explosion of social media has given us instant access to a wealth of user-generated content. From Facebook to Twitter to Google+, we are now only ever a few keystrokes away from a potentially global audience. And as these tools increase global connectivity, people seem increasingly willing to project their thoughts, opinions and observations into cyberspace. The process of information generation has produced what has been described as “new digital commons of enormous size and wealth”. Second, and on a larger scale, the scope of open-source intelligence has been completely changed by the rise of big data.

The Agile Culture - Leading through Trust and Ownership
Agile is a mindset; a mindset focused on delivering quality products that customers love. Agile is focused on getting to market quickly – before the competition. In command and control cultures, things happen in a more serial fashion. There is lots of space between development and testing. The voice of the customer is silent for long portions of time – and often missing until the project ends. Business leaders think they “know” what customers want but are often mistaken. In today’s dynamic world, organizations must turn their focus on what they can do to unleash their teams and then support them with what they need.

“Enterprise Architecture is a tech problem!” Challenge Accepted
Incremental Enterprise Architecture (iEA) is a business process that solves two main problems my client was having with how it was implementing solutions. My client has a storied past of being the best IT shop in the business, and the customer testimonials certainly tell a tale of technicians, and leaders bending over backwards to solve complex business issues with the rapid development of tools on a case by case basis. This storied past and the dedication of the staff lends itself to great external reputation which is a good thing but it also leads you to multiple different solution silos that are not interoperable and have scores of redundant data sources.

CIO-CFO Collaboration for IT Governance
Should the CFO care about their IT projects and performance, the majority opinion is a resounding “YES”! Through CIO-CFO collaboration, the right mindset can be better shaped in IT transformation project; such as: ROI-focused, vigilant on scope, knowing the business objects and how this transformation project links to the overall business goals. The strong senior leadership can enforce IT governance principles and practices, to ensure ROI is really going to achieve; control project scope and exploit business objectives accordingly.

Data Backup is More Important Than Ever
Data Loss Can Cost Your Business More Than You Ever Imagined. If you don’t have a backup strategy in place because you considered it too expensive, let’s redefine the term “expensive.” As a business owner, try to imagine what it would cost or if your company could even operate without your business data including QuickBooks files, client records and order information. Consider the time and expense of attempting to recreate the lost data and notifying your customers that their personal data has been compromised? If those scenarios sound terrible, then review these truly sobering data loss statistics and consider the impact this could have on your business if you don’t have a tested backup solution

Quote for the day:

"Success is the prize for those who stand true to their ideas!" -- Josh S. Hinds

May 17, 2014

Gartner Says Adaptive Sourcing Holds the Key to Business Growth
"The one-size-fits-all sourcing strategy is no longer appropriate for an IT organization that will increasingly be asked to be accountable for end-to-end production services, which will, of necessity, be based on a hybrid IT approach," said Mr. Da Rold. "IT must continue to run the essential business operations. It must differentiate the business through improvements to business processes, and it must also innovate — providing access to new digital opportunities. If IT fails to drive innovation, the business will acquire it elsewhere — because IT purchasing is already moving beyond the IT budget."

7 New Competencies for a Competent HR Department
Regrettably, however, conventional courses in International HR and IHRM textbooks do a poor job of preparing practitioners for the international marketplace. They tend to focus on categorizing employees as HCNs (Host Country Nationals), PCNs (Parent Country Nationals), and TCNs (Third Country Nationals) and calculating their compensation and benefits. Obviously, this is crucial but as it becomes increasingly more difficult to neatly slot global employees, and since there is no longer a “typical” overseas posting, many international firms choose to outsource this function to the experts specializing in international compensation.

Top 12 tech hoaxes of all time
The art of the hoax is woefully underappreciated. Properly executed hoaxes can be creative, cautionary, and (ideally) funny. The Digital Age has muddied the waters, though. Online scams, viral marketing, and even late-night TV gagshave blurred the distinctions between hoaxes, pranks, stunts, and outright criminal fraud – so blurred them, in fact, that one might need an expert to distinguish them from one another. Luckily, one such expert exists: Alex Boese, author and curator of The Museum of Hoaxes. According to Boese, a hoax is "a deliberately deceptive act that has succeeded in capturing the attention (and, ideally, the imagination) of the public." Here is a look at 12 all-time great hoaxes in tech history.

Big Data = Big Money: The ROI of Business Intelligence
According to business intelligence advisors such as SAS Analytics, “ultimately data governance is not about the data. It’s about how better control and management of data enables business strategy, improves business outcomes, and reduces risk.” In a data-driven reimagining of a famous JFK quote: “ask not what your data can do for you, ask what you can do with your data.” Simply aggregating data isn’t enough. Companies must collect the right information. Data that isn’t actionable can only impact the bottom line negatively. Collection of non-actionable data can kill an analysis effort before it begins.

Internap Debuts OpenStack-Powered AgileCloud
“Everybody’s trying to grab market share from AWS and Microsoft Azure. I think this positions Internap really well as providing the more complete offering,” Miller told CRN. Internap's new channel program now includes services and support that Bridgepointe's sales agents and engineers can rely on to tackle technical issues, address contractual and administrative functions, and offer post-sale customer service, Miller said. “Internap had predominantly been a channel program where it was more integrated with the direct sales force on every single deal. Now we have more support on the channel-specific resources available to us,” Miller told CRN.

Why is dotAfrica Important for the African Continent?
The African Union Commission, which initiated the process of dotAfrica as far back 2009 under its mandate to unite the continent both socially and politically, received the support of 39 of the AU’s 54 member states as well as the private sector. In its ICANN application, it defined the purpose of the dotAfrica domain as: “To establish a world class domain name registry operation for the dotAfrica Top Level Domain (TLD) by engaging and utilizing African technology, know-how and funding; for the benefit and pride of Africans; in partnership with African governments and other ICT stakeholder groups…in addition, to adhere to the spirit of inclusivity…”

Peer to Peer File Sharing Through WCF
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or work loads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. They are said to form a peer-to-peer network of nodes. Each node is a computer on the network which acts and communicates with other Peers to make a portion of their resources, such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth, directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination by servers or stable hosts.

Ensuring Business Continuity with the Right Governance
Having strict governance in place ensures the BC protocols the organization has implemented will be carried out by the book in the event of a disaster. With the proper governance or committee in place, organizations are more likely to address many of the threats they face. According to the survey, 46 percent of organizations with such a system in place were able to address different levels of threats including cyber terrorism as part of their BCM, compared with 32 percent for those without.

What to expect from the data centre in 2025
“On the road, we see sports cars and family cars; we see buses and we see trucks. They have different kinds of engines, different types of seating and different characteristics in terms of energy consumption and reliability. We are going to see something similar to that in the data center world. In fact that is already happening, and I expect it to continue,” says Andy Lawrence, vice president of Datacenter Technologies and Eco-efficient IT at 451 Research. Lawrence was commenting on a new report, Data Center 2025: Exploring the Possibilitieswhich was commissioned by Emerson Network Power.

Cabling in Top-of-the-Rack Architectures
ToR switching allows oversubscription to be handled at the rack level, with a small number of fiber cables providing uniform connectivity to each rack. The advantage of this solution is that horizontal fiber can support different I/O connectivity options, including Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet as well as Fiber Channel. The use of fiber from each rack also helps protect infrastructure investments as evolving standards, including 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet, are more likely to be implemented using fiber before any other transmission mechanism. By limiting the use of copper to within racks, the ToR model isolates the cabling that changes most often to the parts of the data center that change most frequently – the racks themselves.

Quote for the day:

"Leadership requires the courage to make decisions that will benefit the next generation." -- Alan Autry

May 16, 2014

Towards Agile CMMI Level 3: Requirement Development and Verification
Requirement grooming is a practice widely used in the agile community. We’ll focus on the verification for requirements. Grooming ensures that backlog items will be consistent, won’t be repeated, and will not become obsolete. This is usually performed in non-agile environments with a checklist, but there is no reason not to also use a checklist with product-backlog items to remind us what a good user story should be. Since the same artefact is checked in formal lifecycles, why not use the same checklist with an agile practice?

Remedies for Data Migration Pain
Data governance is a powerful pill as it not only knocks out the causes of the common data headaches, it helps prevent them. Data migration headaches are no exception. A finely tuned data governance program can reduce duplicate data throughout the organization, reduce errors in reporting and coding and reduce costs associated with poor data quality. The administrative framework and council of a well-defined data governance program support decisions, especially cross-functional decisions, with objectivity and consistency, allowing for decisions to be made quickly with greater accuracy and confidence. The data governance charter also supports and encourages business and IT collaboration as well as interdepartmental data sharing.

Microsoft CEO Nadella aces first-100-day test
"I'd definitely give him an A on selecting his team," said Ottinger. "From the March 3 announcements on, Nadella made his decisions quickly." That day, Microsoft announced a major shake-up of its senior leadership. Out was Tony Bates, who had led business development -- and been in the running for the CEO spot -- and Tami Reller, marketing boss and once co-chief of Windows. Mark Penn, the creator of the "Scroogled" attack ads, was shifted to chief strategy officer; Chris Capossela was made chief marketing officer. "All of that within a month," said Ottinger, who ticked off other personnel changes, including Stephen Elop's return to Microsoft and Scott Guthrie's promotion to lead the cloud group Nadella had left.

Why Machine Learning Matters When Choosing a Big Data Vendor
Machine learning is the proper way to make use of all that big data companies are collecting and analyzing. In fact, machine learning is a far more effective way to analyze data since, unlike other methods, it is designed to work with vast amounts of different types of data that is constantly changing. Machine learning has the capability to analyze an entire set of data, not just a small portion of it, allowing for more accurate results. The very nature of machine learning also allows its analytics to operate at a faster pace.

Improve the Performance of Your Existing Storage Systems
Obviously, solid state storage is the king of the hill when it comes to raw performance, so it's no surprise that adding some solid state storage to an existing environment would improve overall performance of the system as a whole. In general, PCI-e-based sold state storage devices are leveraged for this purpose. They are installed inside a host machine and configured as a mega cache for the SAN. With a large cache at its disposal, a server can much more quickly read and write data from and to storage. The ultra-fast cache acts as the intermediary in this case so that the server itself doesn't have to deal with constantly slow reads and writes from the legacy storage environment. This solution is not low cost, though.

Mobile collapse and emerging markets cause cut in IT spending growth
"This volatility, coupled with the macroeconomic uncertainty in many emerging markets, is somewhat masking a more positive underlying foundation for enterprise IT spending, with firms continuing to invest in working off that pent-up demand to replace old servers, storage and network gear," said Stephen Minton, vice president in IDC's Global Technology & Industry Research Organisation. "Some of that spending is also driving IT services, despite the fact that an increasing number of businesses are moving more of their traditional IT budget to the cloud," he added. IDC expects 10 percent of software spending to be on cloud services by the end of 2014, while infrastructure-as-a-service should soak up 15 percent of spend on servers and storage.

Cloud bursting: Better tools are needed to live up to its promise
The promise of cloud bursting is to do a better job of fitting capacity to demand. Organizations can't squander cash on a kit that spends half of its time idle (if they could, no one would have bothered replacing their internal telephone networks with VoIP). It would be so much easier to cope with variable computing demand by maintaining only enough hardware for predictable loads and shipping the rest -- the spikes in demand -- to the cloud. The process of deciding how much hardware to buy for next year would rely more on metrics and less on gambling.

AT&T to activate HD Voice over 4G LTE in four states on May 23
To work, HD Voice requires that both parties in a call have an HD-capable handset and a cellular base station (usually located at the base of a tower) between them that's equipped to pass the HD signal. To enable HD in the handset, the AT&T spokeswoman said the carrier will begin selling "very soon" the HD Voice-capable Samsung Galaxy S4 mini with a 4.3-in. Super AMOLED display. Both T-Mobile and Sprint started rolling out HD Voice to their 3G networks last year. T-Mobile sold its first version of the iPhone, the iPhone 5, with HD Voice capability last year.

Want 'perfect' security? Then threat data must be shared
Most of the big anti-malware companies not only understand who is doing the crime and what they are after, but know within minutes whenever one of these groups initiates a new "campaign" (such as using a new malware program or new phishing strategy) or when they are initiating from new IP addresses. There are literally a hundred companies and thousands of people that have a pretty good understanding about the badness on the Internet. They can see the new trends as they are happening. Individually, none of the groups has all the information. But if you put all these groups together sharing information we'd have a pretty good lock on all the bad guys.

Security Trends in Cloud Computing Part 4: Public sector
Data classification is an important method of increasing the protection and proper management of information by separating it into categories based on sensitivity (high, medium or low, for example). More sensitive or critical information can be given greater protection, while lower risk information can be made more accessible, as appropriate. This process can improve compliance efforts and help safeguard important records, allowing other data and resources to be managed more smoothly. Conversely, weak or incomplete data classification strategies could result in improper handling of sensitive private data, raising the risks of accidental release or corruption, or the potential exposure of confidential information to employees whose jobs do not require access.

Quote for the day:

"In a crisis if I had only an hour I'd spend the first 50 minutes defining the problem and the last 10 minutes solving it." -- Albert Einstein

May 15, 2014

RHEL 7 and Fedora 19 updates for simpler configuration and management
The firewalld daemon introduces a level of abstraction that makes setting up a Linux firewall simpler and more intuitive. Instead of writing firewall rules as iptables, firewalld uses firewall-config [graphical user interface] or firewall-cmd [command-line interface] to set up a firewall. D-bus is an interprocess communication system -- also called a message bus system -- that allows applications and processes to communicate and request services over a bus. The d-bus service, which runs dbus-daemon, notifies processes of events, [such as] when a new device is added or when a user logs in.

Microsoft continues RC4 encryption phase-out plan with .NET security updates
"The use of RC4 in TLS could allow an attacker to perform man-in-the-middle attacks and recover plaintext from encrypted sessions," Microsoft said in " a security advisory Tuesday. "A man-in-the-middle attack occurs when an attacker reroutes communication between two users through the attacker's computer without the knowledge of the two communicating users. Each user in the communication unknowingly sends traffic to and receives traffic from the attacker, all the while thinking they are communicating only with the intended user." While blocking RC4 is recommended, the company said that customers should plan and test the new settings prior to making this change in their environments.

Hybrid IT services in the cloud age: What CISOs should do now
With the convergence of symptoms and causes and independent of the intermingling of in-house and cloud resources, it is clear that triage is triage and initial problem identification is common across domains. To have consistent and robust security in a hybrid IT service environment, problems with externally sourced services have to be treated like problems with internally sourced ones during triage and identification. Ideally, then, there will be a converged operations staff with one team doing all initial diagnosis (and limited resolution) during the most mercurial phase of event response. The triage team will have broad, basic skills across all three domains: networks, applications and security.

How to Use OpenStack in Your Small Business
While all cloud services offer a service level agreement (SLA), it tends to be the same for all customers. In some instances, it's inadequate. In contrast, an abundance of OpenStack service providers theoretically makes it easier to find a suitable provider that offers adequate response time or predictability. A quick look at various cloud outages makes it clear that businesses can't control when they take place — and often remain in the dark as to the severity and exact status of restoration work. The final OpenStack advantage may be most intractable of all: Data privacy. Depending on the services offered, or the type of organization, certain data may be prohibited by law to be stored in public cloud infrastructure.

CloudBolt Software administers your IT, no matter where it runs
“We take an agnostic approach to customers’ IT infrastructure,” Justin Nemmers, CloudBolt’s EVP of marketing, said in an interview. The product works via connectors with popular configuration management tools including Puppet (see disclosure) and Chef, as well as management products from Hewlett Packard (HP Server Automation and Operations Orchestration) and VMware ( VMware vCenter Orchestrator.). The company, which is based in Rockville, Maryland and has a development office in Portland, Oregon, has 11 employees — several of whom come from Red Hat and Hewlett-Packard via Loudcloud/Opsware.

Female Directors and Their Impact on Strategic Change
The findings are consistent with the theory that to have a genuine influence in the business world, women must be granted real power, and simply appointing female directors when times are bad and choices are limited might not matter if they don’t have the capacity to induce change. When companies flounder, demographic differences might stand out most and simple disagreements might become exacerbated. On the other hand, the benefits of a fresh perspective can be more easily applied when firms are doing well and facing few threats. Furthermore, the role of female directors may help explain why one company gains clear benefits from its gender-diverse boardroom while another treads water, depending on its performance record.

Reining in out-of-control security alerts
Software or appliances that fall under the product category of security information and event management (SIEM) generate most of the alerts triggered by anomalies detected in hardware and software on the corporate network. To contend with the alert flood, enterprises have the option of moving to a different model for detecting malware or learning to make better use of the SIEM systems they have, experts said Wednesday. Matthew Neeley, director of strategy initiatives for consulting firm SecureState, advises companies to do the latter to avoid the expense of ripping and replacing technology.

Hadoop security: Hortonworks buys XA Secure – and plans to turn it open source
The Hadoop software and services firm has acquired XA Secure, founded in January 2013, for an undisclosed sum and will open-source the Fremont CA-based company's Hadoop security layer, which offers role-based authorisation, auditing and governance. Hortonworks said the acquisition provides it with key technology and engineering expertise to deliver a single way to administer security across all Hadoop workloads. Ever since the introduction of the YARN resource-management tier last October, which allows multiple workloads to run on the Hadoop distributed big data platform, there has been an increased need for central security, according to Hortonworks VP product management Tim Hall.

An Internet of Things prediction for 2025 -- with caveats
Bob Briscoe, chief researcher in networking and infrastructure for British Telecom believed industrial and health IoT applications, not consumer ones, are the most likely to take off. "The most likely areas where the IoT will be realized will be in supply chain logistics and automating workforce administration -- i.e., dispensing healthcare, logging materials used in fitting and service of goods, vehicles, etc., as well as the administration of cleaning, catering, and hospitality tasks. Industrial and commercial applications are much more likely to have taken hold than these attention-grabbing consumer widgets, which have only superficial economic effect," wrote Briscoe.

Agile Research
Both academic research and the software development produce information-focused artifacts – either the logics captured in the computer code or the knowledge captured in the research publications, so similar principles may be applied to both endeavors. In this article, we have applied the Agile Principles to the field of the academic research, generating the first draft of the “Agile Research” principles; we have also presented practical guidelines for the application of these principles to the Grounded Theory qualitative research methodology, utilizing tools that are similar to those that are used in Agile.

Quote for the day:

"An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous" -- Henry Ford

May 14, 2014

MySQL Backup Solution for C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET
The most common way to backup a MySQL Database is by using MySqlDump.exe and MySQL Workbench. MySQL Workbench is good for developers, but, when comes to client or end-user, the recommended way is to get every parameter preset and all they need to know is press the big button "Backup" and everything is done. UsingMySQL Workbench as a backup tool is not a suitable solution for client or end-user. On the other hand, MySqlDump.exe cannot be used for Web applications. As most web hosting providers forbid that, MySqlBackup.NET will be helpful in building a web-based (ASP.NET/Web-Services) backup tool.

What is holding Berlin back from becoming a European centre for startups?
“Germany is renowned for its bureaucracy and process,” says Kevin McDonagh, CEO of the Android consultancy startup Novoda. “The first few months were very difficult to get anything done. Doing it in a foreign language with foreign laws is difficult.” McDonagh, who launched his business in the UK and now has an office in Berlin and New York, says changing simple details on business bank accounts in Germany is difficult enough, with banks wanting specific documents to bring into branch in order to set up a further meeting. “This is a barrier for a company,” he says. He also says companies need a large amount of capital to set up company bank accounts, which is unfeasible for most startups.

Infonomics treats data as a business asset
While few companies are recording data as an asset on their balance sheets, the marketplace does put a premium on "information-centric" companies, according to Laney. As defined by Laney, these are companies that have invested in their data by hiring data scientists or a chief data officer, or by building a data science organization or a data governance function. Companies that meet these criteria, including Netflix, GlaxoSmithKline, Nokia, Apple, American Express and Ford, enjoy a market value to tangible asset or book ratio that's two to three times higher than the norm. "I'm not going to say there's a causal relationship, but it certainly is an interesting correlation," Laney said.

Pro tip: Send faxes with your Android device
Thanks to a free app called FaxFile, you can now send either PDF or doc/docx files to any fax number in the US or Canada (and some international numbers). With FaxFile, you can fax to contact numbers or enter a fax phone number. There isn't a monthly subscription cost, but each fax will cost you fax credits (which are bought through an in-app purchase within the Google Play Store). Fifty credits is $2.49, and each fax to US and Canada costs 10 credits. That's pretty easy math and well worth the cost, considering how easy faxing becomes while on-the-go.

Are Your Partners Protecting Your Data?
For the highest-risk relationships, consider deploying security staff to the business partner’s site and comprehensively assessing and verifying their exposed areas of concern. Think hosted application vendors and cloud computing vendors with data centers in multiple states or countries. An onsite assessment should include staff interviews, physical inspection of the facilities and document reviews as well as technical vulnerability testing. This approach provides much greater assurance of contract, policy and regulatory compliance and gives insight into how data is actually being protected. Interviews should be based on the business associates’ response to the questionnaire. The interviews’ purpose is to validate the responses provided on the questionnaire and spot-checking specific controls.

Why Employers Must Learn That Creativity Is Not Just For the Young
There is enough research to indicate that there are several factors that make a worker more likely to be creative. Along these lines, the “Componential Theory of Creativity”, originated by Teresa Amabile of the Harvard Business School, proposes that there are four factors necessary for a creative worker regardless of age: 1) intrinsic motivation 2) expertise in his/her area 3) skill at creative thinking and 4) employment in an environment that supports creativity. An older worker likely has the first two factors necessary for creativity. Older employees are likely to be internally motivated to take pride in their work, and because of their maturity, more likely to be highly experienced in their field.

Microsoft: We're serious this time; XP's dead to us
"With today's Update Tuesday, if you are still on Windows XP you will not receive any security or non-security updates through Windows Update or Microsoft Update," said Microsoft spokesman Brandon LeBlanc on a company blog. "Because support has ended for Windows XP, we are no longer releasing updates to the general public for Windows XP going forward." LeBlanc's missive was little more than a reminder that Microsoft has absolutely, positively, no-ifs-ands-or-buts retired Windows XP. The firm has been pounding the XP-is-dead drum for years at varying beats. Microsoft served XP with its last Patch Tuesday collection on April 8, making today's set the first sans security updates for the 13-year-old operating system.

Internet of things weakest link: Residential broadband
Even cable providers such as Comcast XFINITY and Cablevision's Optimum Online that used to separate modem, VOIP and router functionality into two or more separate devices installed on premises are going the integrated residential gateway route. Not all residential broadband problems can be attributed to malfunctioning residential gateways. Sometimes the local fiber node for the neighborhood goes down, sometimes you have network issues. Sometimes "acts of God" knock out coax or fiber cables. Unpredictable, widespread outages happen.

How to Execute External Uncompiled C# Code
From time to time, I have had need to extend a program I wrote by having it execute a script, but wanted the script to use data from within the application, logging, etc. This approach allows me to use the power of C#. In production code, I would use checksums on the C# code files to make sure only authorized scripts could be compiled and run. ... Obviously, the code you want to execute hast be as compilable as the code you would have in your project.

IT sourcing strategy guide for enterprise CIOs
There are several queries CIOs must consider in crafting an appropriate IT sourcing strategy for the enterprise. What are your primary objectives for outsourcing? Do you wish to contract with foreign and/or domestic providers? What services do you require to relieve stretched-thin IT departments? In this CIO Briefing, learn how to create an IT sourcing strategy that fits your organization, and get advice from CIOs who have been there, done that. This Essential Guide on IT sourcing strategy in the enterprise is part of the CIO Briefings series, which is designed to give IT leaders strategic management and decision-making advice on timely topics.

Quote for the day:

"Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better." -- Peter F. Drucker

May 13, 2014

What are the best practices for data center cleaning?
The real key to keeping a data center clean: Control what comes in from outside. Never unpack or uncrate equipment -- and certainly don't store cartons -- inside the data center. You should have a place outside, preferably with a negative pressure environment, where you can unpack and clean all hardware before it comes inside. Create a "clean zone" outside your data center, such as a vestibule or corridor that is not regularly trafficked and is cleaned daily. When mechanics or electricians work inside the data center, insist that they wear clean clothing or clean cover-ups. Anything needed from the outside should be brought from the warehouse, unpacked, and handed off at the door.

The core components of the new generation of records management/information governance tools
When implementing such EDRM systems the records managers drew a 'line in the sand'. They aimed to implement a system that would manage records going forward in time. They did not attempt to deal with legacy content that had already accumulated on shared drives and in email. The weakness of EDRM systems was that end users did not move all or most significant content into the records system. Shared drives and e-mails continued to grow and continued to contain important content not captured into the records system.

As Patch Tuesday looms, Microsoft gives Windows 8.1 users a reprieve
On Monday -- and just a day before its May Patch Tuesday slate of security fixes -- Microsoft said consumers have four more weeks to move from Windows 8.1 to Windows 8.1 Update before their devices would be barred from receiving further patches. The deadline change was the third in the past month, following an earlier Windows 8.1 Update extension for business users and a surprise update on May 1 for Windows XP after Microsoft had officially retired the aged OS. "We've decided to extend the requirement for our consumer customers to update their devices to the Windows 8.1 Update in order to receive security updates another 30 days to June 10," said Microsoft spokesman Brandon LeBlanc in a Monday blog.

HP pivots, says open sourcing SDNs is right
What’s interesting is that just last fall, HP dismissed open sourcing SDNs, and OpenDaylight. Ex-HPer Mike Banic had said when he was vice president of global marketing for HP Networking that open sourcing SDNs was “wrong” because it means passing the burden and investment of ensuring enterprise-class functionality, reliability and performance onto the customer. And Bethany Mayer, formerly senior vice president and general manager of HP Networking (who has transitioned to a new role at the company), said at that time she didn’t know why customers would use an OpenDaylight controller. “Using an open source controller in the enterprise can be tricky and dangerous,” Mayer said at last fall’s Interop New York conference.

RecruitiFi uses gamification to enhance the recruiting process
"It's like going fishing, eating one, and throwing the bucket of fish -- half a dozen -- away every time," he said. With RecruitiFi, the idea is that a recruiter could submit up to four of those candidates to an employer looking to fill a relevant position. For employers, McCagg said it's a better option than a job board, for example, because they can chose to work with recruiters based on location, expertise, or what level they focus on - the candidates are more likely to be on target for the job. "It's like yelling out across a city like New York, 'Hey I'm looking for this exact person,' but the only people that hear you are relevant recruiters," McCagg said.

NSA backdoors US hardware headed overseas: Greenwald
Greenwald wrote that the NSA puts backdoors onto devices and repackages them with a factory seal before sending the hardware onto its original destination. "A June 2010 report from the head of the NSA's Access and Target Development department is shockingly explicit," Greenwald said. "The NSA routinely receives — or intercepts — routers, servers and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers." He said that part of the reason for the US banning Chinese hardware was to prevent the replacement of NSA-backdoored hardware. "Chinese routers and servers represent not only economic competition but also surveillance competition."

Cloud security policy exceptions thwart rogue usage controls
"Enterprises are blind to cloud usage," said Netskope CEO Sanjay Beri. "People will go off and work in silos, not because they're bad or malicious, but because swiping a credit card is easier than waiting three months to get everyone on the same page. … They don't even necessarily understand the risk, and the number of apps flying under the radar is growing." Beri said the cloud app sprawl plaguing large organizations is largely the result of a lack of coordination among different business units. He said the report shows that many of the apps present in enterprise environments are redundant, with marketing and human resources apps the most frequent culprits.

USB SuperSpeed will relegate Thunderbolt to a niche
Both USB SuperSpeed and Thunderbolt have recently undergone version upgrades - USB moved to v3.1 (SuperSpeed+) and Thunderbolt to v2. And both upgrades double the maximum throughput speed -- USB 3.1 to 10Gbps and Thunderbolt 2 to 20Gbps. But, the USB SuperSpeed specification has a lot of elasticity built into it. "This tech will scale well beyond 10Gbps," said Rahman Ismail, a USB 3.0 senior architect at Intel. "We believe we already have a protocol that will scale well past 40Gbps." Other than speed, Thunderbolt 2 has another advantage over USB 3.1 - 10 watts of power compared with USB SuperSpeed's 4.5 watts.

Want to Solve Problems More Efficiently? Do This.
Programmers always see the big picture and have to think abstractly. In an interview, Gates said that the most difficult thing about programming was “[simulating] in your mind how the program is going to work” and “[having] a complete grasp of how the various pieces of the program work together.” In a way, you need to think as a computer. Identify the input (requirements) and the output (problem). Then find a way to compute (connect) the two. This computation is broken down even further into smaller iterations, getting you closer to the output. As programmers do, you can break down projects into smaller, digestible chunks. Even if you’re not dealing with thousands of lines of code, compartmentalizing the process makes it easier to manage.

How Functional is Java 8?
Whether a language is functional or not is not a binary condition - instead, languages exist on a spectrum. At the extreme end are languages that basically enforce functional programming, often by prohibiting mutable data structures. Clojure is one example of a language that does not permit mutable data in the accepted sense. However, there are other languages in which it is common to write programs in a functional style, despite the language not enforcing this. An example would be Scala, which is a blend of object-oriented and functional languages. It permits functions as values, such as:

Quote for the day:

"The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective." -- Warren Buffett