Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

August 11, 2014

When Robots Take All the Work, What’ll Be Left for Us to Do?
Humans will continue to be useful workers, the argument goes, because of things like empathy, creativity, judgment, and critical thinking. Consider the all-too-common experience of calling customer service reps whose employers force them to follow a script—a kind of pseudo-automation. When made to follow a decision tree the way a computer would, all four of those qualities are sucked out of the interaction—no opportunity to exercise creativity, empathy, judgment, or critical thinking—and the service provided tends to stink. “Detecting complaints is an AI problem. Sending the complaints to the correct customer service entity is an AI problem,” said one unnamed Pew respondent described as a university professor and researcher. “But customer service itself is a human problem.”

We cannot do modern science unless it's open
No one will write code for a competitor but many will write to interoperate with a collaborator. We got to know each other, and in 2005 most of us met at the American Chemical Society (ACS) under the blue obelisk in San Diego. I suggested we form a close, informal community under the label Blue Obelisk and that we adopt the mantra: open data, open standards, open source (ODOSOS). We have a mailing list and at intervals I buy Blue Obelisks as awards for publicly valuable contributions. There's a communal agreement to interoperate but no downwards control. It just happens in its own way and at its own speed. We reviewed 5 years on and had 20 groups authoring the paper, which is a remarkable achievement for a very conservative discipline (chemistry) where established companies are more valued than innovation.

When Payment Processing Becomes A Commodity
A catalyst for a commoditization of payment processing is the introduction of cryptocurrencies and new payment protocols like bitcoin and Ripple, which renders clearing obsolete and dramatically lowers the transaction cost for merchants. As a comparison, the transaction cost for payments through Visa/Mastercard/PayPal is ranging between 3-5 percent depending on the transaction size. The transaction cost for bitcoin on the other side is as low as 1 percent with continuing efforts to reduce transaction fees from the bitcoin community. To accelerate the development Bitpay recently announced removed the transaction fees on the starter plan, offering free unlimited payment processing to merchants accepting BitCoin.

New devices run on Wi-Fi signals alone
To find out exactly how the Wi-Fi backscatter devices work, Crave contacted Bryce Kellogg, a doctoral student in electrical engineering and co-author on the research, which will be published at the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communication's annual conference this month in Chicago. He explained that the gadgets function by either reflecting or not reflecting the Wi-Fi signal running between say, a router and a laptop. That interruption in the signal can be then be read by software on the laptop much in the same way binary code is interpreted.

When Data Joins The Dark Side
"Sometimes data goes dark because we're simply too busy to deal with it, so we push it to the side and ignore it," Colgan said. "Maybe we don't have the right tools to address the scale or speed, or to shine a light on the data." Alternatively, data can go dark when it's trapped in a repository -- a legacy archive, for instance -- that renders it difficult to access or analyze. "We have a lot of customers interested in migrating off legacy archives," said Colgan. "They're doing so for a couple of reasons: One, a number of archives are at end of life, and (customers) want to go to a more modern platform; two, they want to migrate to the cloud."

Enterprise Security: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
Each year there are more than 50 million cyber attacks in the UK alone and this number is rising. It’s fast becoming evident that old security technologies are diminishing in effectiveness and holes are opening up in corporate security networks. In the paragraphs below I explore the good, the bad and the ugly to dispel some of the common myths around the enterprise security armoury. ... It’s become commonplace for employees to access corporate email via a mobile device. Often this is not a standard work-issue device and IT managers are challenged with managing multiple devices all with different operation systems.

The Latest Strategy in the Fight Against Offensive Social Media Content
Possibilities include using natural language filters to pick out tweets that are likely to be offensive and then quarantining the authors. Another is a peer review model in which people rate the offensiveness of tweets and those responsible for the content deemed most offensive are quarantined. But these approaches raise all kinds of practical questions: where should the cut-off lie between people who should be quarantined versus those who should not; how long should individuals be quarantined for and so on. And what of users simply reregister under another name?

15 Technologies Changing How Developers Work
A long time ago, developers wrote assembly code that ran fast and light. On good days, they had enough money in their budget to hire someone to toggle all those switches on the front of the machine to input their code. On bad days, they flipped the switches themselves. Life was simple: The software loaded data from memory, did some arithmetic, and sent it back. That was all. ... The work involved in telling computers what to do is markedly different than it was even five years ago, and it's quite possible that any Rip Van Winkle-like developer who slept through the past 10 years would be unable to function in the today's computing world. Everything seems to be changing faster than ever.

Mobile chips face lockdown to prevent hacks
A well-designed system can provide multiple layers to prevent malicious attacks and injection of rogue code, said Chandra, adding that the hardware, security subsystem and software on mobile hardware need to work together. Besides ARM, chip makers like Intel and AMD are working to bring more security features so mobile devices are shielded from attacks. The companies are knitting together hardware and software to work more cohesively in a system, and also establishing hypervisors, secure boot layers, and segmented areas -- much like sandboxes -- in which code could be executed without compromising a system.

The Importance of Putting People First
Undaunted, the new CEO (the founder’s son) explains that he may be new but the one thing he knows is that “Burridge’s is its staff,” and he intends to look out for their welfare. He sends the manager to make the call. A bit patrician perhaps (the series is set in the 1950s, after all), but it’s a reminder that there can be a human connection between employer and employee. It is in this light that I began to consider the recent announcement that Starbucks had forged an alliance with Arizona State University to make 40 online degree programs affordable for its employees.

Quote for the day:

"Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier." -- Charles F. Kettering

August 10, 2014

The Theory and Tragic Reality of IT Projects
It is still possible, and there are some shining gems produced this way, but most corporate software projects today involve groups of developers, often working in remote teams and with numerous personnel changes over the lifecycle of a piece of software. This type of project requires careful management, regardless of the programming language involved. Several different types of development model have evolved to cope with the challenges of creating software code that works well, is properly commented and can be updated later by people who weren't involved in writing the original program.

Cloud complexity hinders some enterprise adoption. So, what’s the answer?
The enterprise architect in me would suggest that the best solution for enterprises that are already hindered by architectural complexity without the presence of cloud computing is to get their respective “acts together” before they adopt cloud computing. However, the world does not work that way. In the real world, most enterprises would have to do a ton of work over many years to be perfectly ready to move easily to cloud-based platforms. The root issue is the ability to manage complexity, including the addition of applications (new and old) that will run on public cloud platforms. The trick is to think in terms of replacement, and not additions.

Why CIOs Must Rethink How They Measure Success
There’s only one problem: Most are measuring the wrong items. This became strikingly clear in a recent Forrester survey that asked CIOs, CFOs, and CMOs to define their top ten measurements of technological success. To say that the lists didn’t match would be an understatement. What CIOs considered the most important measurement, the percentage of projects that met or exceeded expectations, ranked fourth in the business leaders’ list. Conversely, the CMOs’ and CFOs’ most important metric, IT cost per business service, ranked fourth for the CIOs.

Artificial intelligence will not turn into a Frankenstein's monster
Yes, we do have lots of AI systems, like chess programs or automated financial transaction systems, or the software in driverless cars. And some are already smarter than most humans, like language translation systems. Some are as good as some humans, such as driverless cars or natural speech recognition systems and will soon be better than most humans. But none of this has brought about the end of civilisation (though I'm suspiciously eyeing the financial transaction systems). The reason is that these are all narrow-AI systems: very good at doing one thing.

To stop security breaches, kill the username and password
This is not a new idea. Far from it. The OpenID standard, for example, is basically the same concept, and there were others before. Meanwhile, the government has proposed its own solution, lovingly titled National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC). OpenID found a fair bit of success when it comes to straightforward authentication tasks, but it's never been a player when it comes to online retail. Recently, major online identity companies like Janrain and Facebook have withdrawn support. (Facebook has launched its own authentication service, Facebook Connect.)

How Technology Can Fix 4 Big Problems of India
It has been predicted that some of the most fundamental problems in India like healthcare, food, water, and energy, are going to worsen alarmingly over the next three decades. Sure, the country has made a lot of progress over the last few decades, particularly since the economic reforms were initiated in 1991, but apparently, that’s way too little. Things have come to such that India’s most intricate issues are now likely to become almost impossible to handle unless something is done urgently. This will cause severe disruptions to lives and businesses. Maybe technology can help?

Microsoft blocking of old ActiveX not enough
App development rules for these environments are strict and the developers must pay Microsoft for the privilege of being a developer and of testing and hosting their apps. But the problems are far from insurmountable. For one thing, I see no reason why Microsoft would need to host anyone else's code. For another, Microsoft could set terms for allowing third parties into the system. One option would be for the Windows Update servers to serve code hosted on other vendors' servers. Or Microsoft could license Windows Update server software to the third parties to run on their own servers, and their installation process could configure the Windows Update client to look for updates on those servers as well. Or Microsoft could host the third party code

.NET CLR Injection: Modify IL Code during Run-time
Modifying .NET methods' MSIL codes during run-time is very cool, it helps to implement hooking, software protection, and other amazing stuff. That's why I want it, but there is a big challenge on the road -- the MSIL code could have been complied to native code by JIT-complier before we have a chance to modify; also the .NET CLR implementation is not documented and it changes during each version, we need a reliable and stable way without dependency to the exact memory layout.

Google's big-data tool, Mesa, holds petabytes of data across multiple servers
A Mesa implementation can hold petabytes of data, update millions of rows of data per second and field trillions of queries per day, Google says. Extending Mesa across multiple data centers allows the data warehouse to keep working even if one of the data centers fails. Google built Mesa to store and analyze critical measurement data for its Internet advertising business, but the technology could be used for other, similar data warehouse jobs, the researchers said. "Mesa ingests data generated by upstream services, aggregates and persists the data internally, and serves the data via user queries," the researchers wrote in a paper describing Mesa.

Enterprise Architecture: Don't Be a Fool with a Tool

As Viswanathan explains, there are three basic approaches to applying TOGAF: “The first approach is to baseline first, because it’s good for cleaning up messes. Second, target [business outcomes] first, which is best for greenfield companies.” But for many organizations, the mess is so bad that if they spent all their time on the baseline, they’d never achieve any business outcomes at all. For those organizations, Viswanathan recommends “some baseline, then target. Take an iterative approach. Take a pain point, create that slice of EA. Back the TOGAF cycle into that.”

Quote for the day:

"Decisiveness is a characteristic of high-performing men & women. Almost any decision is better than no decision at all." -- Brian Tracy

August 09, 2014

Talking To Big Machines
In Comstock’s vision, software intelligence improves machines in two respects: it makes them both more selfish and more selfless. “Selfish machines” monitor themselves and ask for help when they need it, as when a jet engine calls for service because vibration sensors have detected early signs of wear. Human operators have typically performed this function, observing, for instance, that a combination of rising temperature and falling pressure suggests an oil leak. Not only can software monitor machines at extremely high accuracy and frequency, it can also present nuanced, abstracted conclusions to human users.

Redefine App and Data Delivery for the Modern Workforce
The modern workforce is one that spans devices, countries, time zones and schedules. Delivering apps and data to them can be a serious challenge, and moreover, a serious drain on your resources.So join Holger Daube for this session as he shows you how to: Move your enterprise from device-level management to dynamic delivery of apps and data; Create highly automated, self-service systems to securely deliver data and applications across all devices; and Build a well-managed foundation that enables end user services (e.g., BYOD, VDI, app store) within an ITaaS framework

Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem
As an enterprise start-up, Meraki has been impeded by its distance from the web scene. It simply does not have the same recognition as a consumer company whose products users (and potential recruits) interact with every day. “You say, ‘I work at Pinterest,’ and people know what that is — they use Pinterest,” Biswas said. “You tell them you work at Meraki, and they’re a little more reserved. They’re like, ‘What’s that?’ Once we explained our culture and our approach, we were able to hire great talent, but it’s always a challenge.” Since the acquisition, Biswas, who is 32, has fought to retain the spirit of the vanguard, but his struggle reveals an implicit fear — that young engineers might be willing to work at Meraki but not at Cisco

Keeping IT Relevant isn't about the Title of the CIO
There are ramifications for the entire IT organization when pursuing a staffing model that includes technical and business savvy folks being embedded within each of the functions. There is the risk of further stratification of IT between the "innovators" and the "operations teams". There is the risk of having a distributed team performing poorly or not communicating without greater leadership focus. The fact is, there isn't an easy way to slice this artichoke and someone's ego or job function is likely to get poked. However, if you have the courage to make the necessary changes and make the tough calls on staffing models based on people and opportunity not silos or turf, you can make it work.

The cultural gaps between enterprise mobility and business intelligence
"When the project is coming from the BI team, these are the guys who have been doing BI and publishing dashboards around the company," Alsbury said. "The first thing typically they are looking at is we have these ten reports or these thirty five reports now we want to enable people to access them on their phone so can you make our reports that look this way look the same way on a phone? That's the first break down right there." Alsbury adds that some organizations perceive is as a transcription or transposition project where we are taking the same thing they look at here on their desktop and put the same thing on their phone.

Peer Pressure! Business Pushing the Cloud on Enterprise IT
"The cloud is getting so much attention and chat time that all of a sudden there is an urgency," said Jeff Kagan, an independent analyst. "Tomorrow the cloud will be tested and trusted. However, today it's still the wild, wild West. IT executives know this but they get pressure from their chief executives to jump into the cloud because it's becoming the new code word for success. And no one wants to be last." Brad Shimmin, an analyst with Current Analysis, said IT shops are under considerable pressure to improve overall operational efficiency and even to drive business opportunities through the nimbleness that comes along with being a leaner organization.

Taking A Wait-And-See Approach With Disruptive Innovations
While the word has taken on many meanings (as Lepore’s article notes), Christensen’s original definition includes two characteristics that show up in sequence. At first, the technology performs worse than alternatives on performance criteria that mainstream customers care about. At this point, we can only say that it is potentially disruptive. Only if its performance later improves can we say that a technology is actually disruptive. That’s why startups with potentially disruptive technologies start out competing instead of cooperating. Incumbents can’t tell whether their technology is any good, so they decline to license it.

Five Smart Cybersecurity Moves From Top Security CEOs
The complexity of security threats to individuals has also increased, but no individual cybersecurity issue will receive the headlines that a corporate breach would, so one can be lulled into a false sense of security. I sought the counsel of four CEOs of major information security companies to ask them what steps they take personally to secure their information and their computing devices. They offered the following five recommendations.

The future of TV is social
Now there’s a whole generation of cord-cutters, something my colleague Janko has written about extensively, and I have one daughter firmly in that camp: when she and her boyfriend got an apartment together, they chose to get high-speed internet and either download everything they want to watch or stream it via an Android set-top box. But my two youngest daughters — one teenager, one in her 20s — are even further down the curve: like the kids surveyed by Variety, names like PewDiePie and Smosh are more relevant to them than than most Hollywood actors.

Why Do We Need Self-Organising Teams?
Organisations have no longer been able to choose whether they want to respond to these demands or not. Change has become mandatory. Trying to hold onto the status quo is like trying to keep the leaves on trees in autumn. For an organisation to be successful, it must adequately deal with the risks and use the opportunities every change brings along. In other words, the organisation must keep up with, or ideally be ever so slightly ahead of, the current market demands. How inconvenient then that this market behaves unpredictably. That which is ‘top’ today can be a ‘flop’ tomorrow; yesterday’s success factor can become a burden overnight.

Quote for the day:

"Simplicity and complexity need each other." -- John Maeda

August 08, 2014

Sysinternals new Sysmon tool looks for intruder traces
Sysinternals is a set of Windows utility programs first released in 1996, long before Russinovich joined Microsoft. Almost all were written by Russinovich and his then-partner Bruce Cogswell. Sysmon, written by Russinovich and Thomas Garnier, also of Microsoft, is the 73rd tool in the set, and has been used internally at Microsoft for some time. The point of Sysmon is to monitor for three specific system events which are often used by malicious processes and which can be difficult to separate from the flood of events in a normal Windows system. Sysmon runs as a service using the Local System account and loads very early in the boot process in order to give the best chance of finding the origin of any problems.

8 Reasons Big Data Projects Fail
Big data is all the rage, and many organizations are hell bent on putting their data to use. Despite the big data hype, however, 92% of organizations are still stuck in neutral, either planning to get started "some day" or avoiding big data projects altogether. For those that do kick off big data projects, most fail, and frequently for the same reasons. ... Because so many organizations are flying blind with their data, they stumble in predictable ways (including thinking that a data scientist will magically solve all their problems, but more on that below). Gartner's Svetlana Sicular has catalogued eight common causes of big data project failures, including:

Continuous Improvement Of Your Compliance Program, Part II
While many companies will look at continuous monitoring as a software solution that can assist in managing risk, provide reporting metrics and, thereby, insights across an organization, it should be viewed more holistically. You will need to take many disparate systems, usually across a wide international geographic area, which may seem like an overwhelming process. Justin Offen, explained this in his article, entitled “Mission Impossible? Six steps to continuous monitoring”, where he detailed a six-point program to ensure that your “CM solution doesn’t become part of the problem” rather than a solution.

Technology and marketing disconnect hinders customer analytics success
“What tends to happen and what we have seen in recent years, is that there’s a fundamental disconnect in the way business leaders think about data, and how technology leaders think about it,” she told CMO in an interview before the event. “We see lots of lost opportunities. There has been a focus on big data projects and platforms and solutions by technology teams, or vendors are wooing marketing leaders, but they’re not so good at solving business problems. Business and technology are not working together towards a common purpose, which is using that data for customer engagement.”

How SaaS solutions help CFOs get IT right
With the widespread acceptance of SaaS, it’s easier to evaluate technology based on what your business needs rather than getting bogged down in details about functional alignment with existing technology. And this rings true for many types of business solutions, including finance. Leading CFOs have realized they are uniquely positioned to consider potential TCO, ROI and use-case factors to determine how well solutions fit with the overall business strategy, even if they are non-technical. At the same time, CFOs are increasingly embracing cloud computing. 72 percent of CFOs believe that “disruptive” technologies such as cloud, social and mobile will change the way they structure and run finance.

Car Security Is Likely to Worsen, Researchers Say
Because of the proliferation of wireless access in vehicles, especially Bluetooth and cellular connectivity, remote execution is increasingly possible. The feasibility of sending commands to the electronic control units that manage different vehicle functions depends on the design of the car. Car companies need to design their systems to detect exploitation attempts and prevent security from being compromised, Miller said: “You want to make each of these three steps harder for the attacker.” But with car manufacturers competing on features, the addition of in-car applications from navigation to streaming music could leave more vehicles vulnerable, Miller added. “In-car apps and desktop-like features pose huge upcoming threats,” he said.

5 Priorities For Chief Data Officers
How can CDOs ensure their own relevance and success? Finch said the key is making sure that data projects are for the sake of business objectives, not for the sake of data. For example, too many companies take the approach of putting a big data lake in place just hoping somebody will find a use for it. There should be a clear business objective, such as reducing data warehousing costs by a targeted amount, comparing same-store sales to weather patterns to improve merchandising, or streaming real-time information into the lake and finding more fraudsters.

Seven data science lessons from McGraw-Hill Education analytics guru
Practice, practice, practice, Essa said, citing Ezra Pound's classic guide to writing poetry, ABC of Reading. "His idea was read lots of poetry to prepare," Essa said. "So we do that with data scientists." He gives data scientists all kinds of data sets (on education and beyond) and instructs them to "do some descriptive analytics and just tell me what questions you can answer." In some cases, data scientists work individually; in others, they operate as part of a team. "A very important part of doing data science is interactive data exploration," he said."

Architecting a High Performance Storage System
A good data storage system is a well-balanced: each individual component is suited for its purpose and all the components fit together to achieve optimal performance. Designing such a system is not straightforward. A typical storage system consists of a variety of components, including disks, storage controllers, IO cards, storage servers, storage area network switches, and related management software. Fitting all these components together and tuning them to achieve optimal performance presents significant challenges. Experienced storage designers may employ a collection of practical rules and guidelines to design a storage
system.

Cyber Risk Strategy Must Evolve to Match Changing Threats
The bad guys are winning, primarily because they can keep one step ahead by deploying a wider array of attack methods. In a recent Deloitte survey, 75 percent of global financial institutions believed their info security program was at a maturity level 3 or higher (on a 1 to 5 scale, with 5 being best), but only 40 percent were confident that they would be protected from outside attack. That’s a scary number, but completely understandable. The cyber threat landscape is constantly evolving, and cybersecurity must transform itself to keep pace. The basis of this new approach is easy to understand. An effective cybersecurity strategy includes three legs: security, vigilance and resilience.

Quote for the day:

"Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody expects of you. Never excuse yourself." -- Henry Ward Beecher

August 07, 2014

Oracle hasn't killed Java -- but there's still time
By the time Oracle bought Sun, its troubles had leaked into Java 7, which took approximately 100 years (give or take) to be released -- and with far fewer features. Oracle started making promises about releases and tried to create a release schedule (good idea), However, it failed to fix Sun's semi-abortive attempts to open-source Java, which might have made it more responsive to the industry, or to create any new Java products that anyone wanted to buy. In fact, Oracle trimmed Sun's portfolio of immature products that no one was purchasing. It was probably a good move, but some of Oracle's offerings in those areas are rickety at best. Then Oracle continued Sun's late attempt to tick off its allies and sued Google with a position ripe with collateral damage for our entire industry. Needless to say it was sort of predictable.

What Does the Future of Work Look Like?
In the future of work, apps and operating systems will light up scenarios such that, whatever device you use, it's the functional equivalent to being on the corporate network. We saw some of this with the DirectAccess feature that Microsoft enabled in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, but this now extends in Windows 8 and beyond. No more user-initiated tunneling. No more clunky laptops trying to boot up. A user will take a computer, unsleep it within a few seconds, and use it like he or she is on the corporate campus. The takeaway for IT? Make the boundary between your network and your users as transparent as you possibly can.

5 Breakthrough DARPA Technologies Beyond GPS
"More worrisome is that adversaries can jam signals. GPS continues to be vital, but its limitations in some environments could make it an Achilles' heel if warfighters rely on it as their sole source of PNT information," DARPA says on its program website. In fact, illegal devices that jam GPS signals are becoming increasingly available. Some simple gadgets that plug into 12-volt car receptacle connectors and cost as little as $30 can render GPS systems inoperable for miles, according to GPS systems provider NovAtel. In its search for new technologies that offer an alternative to GPS, DARPA is particularly interested in systems that provide long-duration precision and accuracy in positioning and timing for global synchronization, secure communications, and cooperative effects.

I give the new Raspberry Pi B+ an A-
My two favorite B+ features are four USB ports (compared to two on the B board) and the micro SD card slot (compared to the full-sized SD card slot on the B board). Micro SD is the perfect platform for a board this small. That, and the micro SD card doesn't stick out too far from the board's boundaries. ... everything on the B+ board is more organized and better placed, although the camera serial interface (CSI) and display serial interface (DSI) didn't move very much. But the DSI is now situated very close to the edge of the board making it more convenient for cabling.

The big data architecture dilemma for CIOs
As CIOs architect for big data, they're likely to bump up against a common and longstanding IT dilemma: To build or buy? Today, big data infrastructure bottlenecks can be specific and ill-suited for the one-size-fits-all solutions that have dominated the market for years. The better fit may come from technology alternatives such as in-memory or NoSQL databases, cloud, open source or, as is the case for Facebook and Tesla, a custom build. But first, CIOs will have to parse through the ambiguity of the term "big data" itself, juxtaposing what has become a catch-all marketing phrase with the technical pain points the business faces. And in the end, they're likely to make surgical rather than sweeping technology investments.

Massive Russian hack has researchers scratching their heads
Some security researchers on Wednesday said it's still unclear just how serious the discovery is, and they faulted the company that uncovered the database, Hold Security, for not providing more details about what it discovered. "The only way we can know if this is a big deal is if we know what the information is and where it came from," said Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisor at Sophos. "But I can't answer that because the people who disclosed this decided they want to make money off of this. There's no way for others to verify."

Run virtual machines on Windows 8.1 with Client Hyper‑V: A quick how-to
Many Windows users aren't aware of it, but a powerful virtualization tool is built into every copy of Microsoft Windows 8.x Pro and Windows 8.x Enterprise, Client Hyper-V. This is the very same Type-1 hypervisor that runs virtualized enterprise workloads and comes with Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2. The virtual machines you create on your desktop with Client Hyper-V are fully compatible with those server systems as well. If you're a software developer and need to do testing, or simply want additional operating system(s) running on your computer, such as Linux, Hyper-V can be a great feature to have enabled on your PC.

Big Data and Biometrics: Why Your Face Matters More than Ever
The face recognition software that makes those Facebook tagging suggestions possible is part of a larger discipline called biometrics that includes fingerprints, retinal scans, and gait recognition, and the field is advancing fast. Combining those capabilities with big data analytics tools allows us to understand who you are simply by looking at you—whether you’re in a photo on Facebook, a video clip, or merely walking around in the world. So, is this good or bad? The answer is probably both.

HTML5: Doomed to fail or just getting started?
Developers want easy-to-use, powerful tools, but HTML5 yields them a somewhat fragmented platform that lags native tool-chains from Apple and Google. Developers need distribution, so they launch in the Apple App Store and/or Google Play Store (never mind that they quickly get lost in the clutter of millions of other apps....). They need monetization, and the major platforms provide an understandable -- if difficult -- route to money. HTML5 offers an open alternative to these platforms, but as VisionMobile points out, "The open nature of HTML5 doesn't intrinsically help anybody do their job better." It may keep developers free, but it doesn't pay the rent.

Internet of Things: A Big Use Case for Big Data
There are three types of data that we have in our study: transactional data, something that comes out of a point of sale system; there’s human-generated data that might be Twitter, a blog or a picture; and then there’s machine-generated data, which is log files, sensors, etc. The reason that machine-generated data swapped places with human-generated data is that from a sensor perspective it’s easy for me to look at the log files that come out of my environmental control system and say “If I raise the temperature in the buildings in the summertime from 71 to 72, I can affect a dollar change and a lowering of my costs.”

Quote for the day:

“To the person who does not know where he wants to go there is no favorable wind.” -- Seneca

August 06, 2014

One Click to Disaster Recovery
Quorum says that the system is secure with all data transferred from the appliance to the disaster recovery cloud going through a 128bit advanced encryption standard (AES) session over a 256bit AES virtual private network tunnel that directly connects the Cloud to the local appliance. There is a dedicated firewall to isolate each virtual network. Moreover, with more than a nod to the retail businesses it hopes to attract, Quorum is Payment Card Industry (PCI) certified, meaning that in the event of a failure all confidential financial information, such as credit card details, is handled in a fully PCI-compliant way.

The antidote to shadow IT: Trust and transparency
Making the situation worse, most IT departments do a poor job of explaining to users what enrolling a device in an enterprise mobile management (EMM) solution means -- they don't clearly explain how they can set restrictions, monitor the device and enterprise assets on it, and wipe some or all data from the device. (Sometimes they're deliberately vague so they don't have to explain how limited those capabilities actually are.) Even when policy documents and guides are explicit about what control and access employees are giving, many users don't trust them. So it's easy to see why surveys find most users are reluctant to hand over control of a personal device to IT, or to accept a device that they're told to treat as their own under the CYOD

Optimize Your Virtual Environment with Software-Defined Storage Approach
With flash storage technology becoming more prevalent and cost-effective, a new approach to consider in virtualized environments is software-defined storage, which employs software as a means for controlling data center storage. In the coming year, current flash-based storage systems are expected to transition to a software-defined approach, producing a new landscape that will change the industry permanently. A software-defined storage tier has the flexibility to scale up or scale out easily as application and business needs dictate.

CIOs Cede Digital Transformation Ground To CMOs
Altimeter's "2014 State of Digital Transformation" report defined digital transformation as "the realignment of, or new investment in, technology and business models to more effectively engage digital customers at every touch point in the customer experience lifecycle." Some 88% of executives and digital strategists indicated that their company is undergoing a formal digital transformation effort this year, according to the report. But only one quarter said they mapped out the digital customer journey and have a clear understanding of new digital touch points.

The CIO and CMO Perspective on Big Data
CIOs can be a good check on the business value of the latest shiny big data tool and force CMOs to put the business outcome first. “Marketing is often used to take quick action and get quick results,” says Meyers of Biogen Idec. “Since much of this is still so new, and the technology is still so immature its important we focus on the handful of things that really matter and spending the time together to work through an experiment and scale it up to something that can be sustainable for the long-haul.” “CMOs and marketing organizations need to hone their focus on both the business questions they need answered, and the decisions they want to inform, with analytics,” says Suzanne Kounkel, principal and leader of Deloitte Consulting’s customer transformation practice.

Why Data Should Be a Business Asset: The 1-10-100 Rule
The 1-10-100 rule can be applied to data quality challenges at various stages in the database lifecycle, since it illustrates the importance of maintaining a high standard of data quality continually rather than occasionally. The rule applied to data is as follows: Verifying the quality a record costs the business $1. This is known as the prevention cost; Cleansing and deduplicating a record costs the business $10. This is the correction cost; and Working with a record that’s never cleansed costs $100. This is the failure cost. ... Data quality is not a problem that can be tackled once and forgotten, and tackling it soon and often is better than late or not at all.

Blackrock: measuring risk in a datacentre
In engineering risk terms, at first glance Blackrock appears to deliver fairly standard resilience. As a minimum standard Tracy says it offers "n+1" resiliency. “We generally have two independent power trains which have their own generators and UPS. Our independent emergency generator and UPS can handle half of the load out on the A and B cord. We could lose an entire generator line and still have ample cover to run the full operation,” he says. After the company bought Barclays Capital in 2010 it had 28 datacentres around the world. Then it began a migration strategy to move to a single platform. Today BlackRock has 11 datacentres and the plan is to get that down to six or eight.

Cybersecurity should be professionalized
"There were a lot of self-described doctors, but no standards," she said. "We need some kind of focal point to gather around to foster minimum, basic standards and frameworks so people have a way to navigate the cybersecurity field." Currently, it is difficult to determine the actual skills and abilities of professionals based on their education or certification credentials, she said. It is even harder to map those skills to real-world job requirements, she said. "There's nothing that prioritizes different educational programs. There are no standards across different specialties. There is no single organization that can take ownership of this field" as the AMA and the American Bar Association do, Spidalieri said.

Transition tips for new leaders
A leadership transition is one of the most important yet underappreciated aspects of a new leader’s experience. It helps to frame the new leader’s role and the relationship that he develops with his team. If managed well, such transitions can make all the difference in promoting acceptance from within the ranks, and allowing the new leader the time and patience necessary to get acclimated and begin to build equity. One of the most successful transitions on record occurred in antiquity.

The Impact of Personalized BI
The biggest challenge in BI is the volume of data that is accessible. When faced with a comprehensive body of data from multiple overarching business systems, it is easy to become overwhelmed. Many leaders use BI as the foundation for reporting, pulling vast amounts of data from disparate systems to create multipage reports that are never actually analyzed. By personalizing your BI, you can streamline the reporting process and create effective, meaningful analytics that help you reach your goals.

Leading a Culture of Effective Testing
Once a team of individuals are given the responsibility to develop, test and support a system, we can either wait for them to come to the conclusion that manual verification isn't going to cut it, or we can avoid gambling and educate them. Making the leap to automated testing can take years without guidance, especially when individuals are overwhelmed with daily responsibilities. Once individuals buy into it, it will take years to become proficient. Most of this can be avoided by leveraging expertise to demonstrate the value.

Quote for the day:

"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards" -- Vernon Sanders Law

August 05, 2014

Yes, there's a tech bubble: Google Shopping Express proves it
Google has plenty of money to subsidize its service as long as it cares to, but the story quotes one observer saying “There’s no line of sight” to making the service pay for itself. This is a money loser now, and it projects to be for the foreseeable future. But at least GSX, as Google calls it, charges something for its service. The real riddle is companies like Seamless.com and WunWun, which offer free or almost free delivery from restaurants and other retailers in a number of cities. Instead of asking consumers to pay, they charge the retailers a commission and other fees that a recent BusinessWeek articlesaid made Seamless unsustainable for many restaurants.

'The Internet Of Things' Will Change Virtually Everything About How Large Companies Operate
The IoT will be a diffuse layer of devices, sensors, and computing power that overlays entire business-to-business, consumer-facing and government industries. The IoT will account for an increasingly huge number of connections: 1.9 billion devices today, and 9 billion by 2018. That year, it will be roughly equal to the number of smartphones, smart TVs, tablets, wearable computers, and PCscombined. In IoT research from BI Intelligence, we look at the transition of once-inert objects into sensor-laden intelligent devices that can communicate with the other gadgets in our lives.

Can Strategic CIOs Create a Renaissance Revolution?
Filippo Passerini, Group President-Global Business Services, and CIO at P&G is passionate about creating information democracy across the various business units. His digitize, visualize, and simulate strategy changed the business model and helped managers make well-informed business decisions. There is no doubt that there is a renaissance revolution occurring in the C-suite today and CIOs are leading the charge. Strategic CIOs change the dynamics of the business enterprise by leveraging information and technology in new and innovative ways to create customer value, improve margins, and enhance shareholder wealth...a winning outcome for any business enterprise.

How giant websites design for you (and a billion others, too)
Facebook’s “like” and “share” buttons are seen 22 billion times a day, making them some of the most-viewed design elements ever created. Margaret Gould Stewart, Facebook’s director of product design, outlines three rules for design at such a massive scale—one so big that the tiniest of tweaks can cause global outrage, but also so large that the subtlest of improvements can positively impact the lives of many.

Ugly Research: Data is easy, Deciding is hard
Tracy Allison Altman over at Ugly Research has a great new white paper – Data is easy: Deciding is hard - in which she quotes me (thanks Tracy). It’s a great paper and makes what I think is the critical point – that you don’t need a data culture but a decision culture. And I would add that you need this at every level – strategic, tactical and operational. The paper has some great advice and I would add a couple of additional thoughts: For decisions you make often – some tactical and all operational decisions for instance – build a decision model so you know how you think you are going to/should make the decision moving forward.

Using Big Data to Optimize Business Operations
Business – and life in general – is becoming data-centric. In order to uphold reliability and preserve reputation, a data center must maintain an unimpeded flow of data at a level not anticipated even just a few years ago. To do that, a data center needs to refine how it values data used in monitoring its own operations so that the flow of information generated in running the facility does not flood or overwhelm IT and management capabilities.

The Dark Age Of Enterprise Software Is Ending
We all need to realize that it’s a whole new ballgame. And just like the insular, glacial world of baseball, this new age of software is a tectonic shift in the enterprise that makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. For our enterprises to succeed in this new world, we need more than just shiny new software. We must change long-held cultural, political biases about “how we do things here.” In making critical decisions, enterprises too often rely on perceived rather than rigorously analyzed historical patterns. They let competing entities argue their positions, too often giving power to the loudest voice in the room.

Defining F5's role in software defined networks
With regards to F5 specifically, the company does have a broad set of software defined application services (SDAS) today. BIG-IQ is an architecture for managing F5 SDAS elements and can be used to provide simplified abstractions to the control or orchestration plane. This can be useful when integrating a number of heterogeneous components. This is why the F5 Synthesis partner ecosystem is so broad today and is an SDN “whose who,” including Cisco, VMware, Big Switch, Arista, Oracle, Splunk, Rackspace, and the list goes on. F5 is also one of the few vendors that’s playing both sides of the VMware/Cisco card. Clearly, the SDN wars are heading down a path where there’s a defined Cisco camp and VMware camp.

Hunting Concurrency Bugs
The bug was in the JVM, rather than my code. I've been waiting since 2010 to publish it, because a malicious coder could insert this into his code and jam up your application server. Since you cannot connect JConsole or jstack or JVisualVM to it, nor can you generate a stack trace with CTRL+Break or CTRL+\, it can be quite tricky to discover where this is coming from. As Java programmers, we often think that all bugs are in our code. But the JVM was also written by people and we all make mistakes. The only reason that there are less bugs is because more people are using the JVM than your code and so the bugs tend to get rooted out more quickly.

Early interest in LTE-connected cars is strong
It's clear GM is fully backing the idea of a connected car. While Audi actually had the 4G LTE-connected car on the market, GM will have the broadest selection of connected cars, with 30 models hitting the market this year. Chan said the goal was to further expand 4G LTE-connection in the car lines next year. Beyond the consumer, Chan said she sees an opportunity to sell its 4G LTE-connected car service to businesses that deal with vehicles, such as the trucking industry. GM has opened up its software programming to allow businesses to create apps that take advantage of a connected car.

Quote for the day:

"Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching." -- Thomas Jefferson

August 04, 2014

Urban Jungle a Tough Challenge for Google’s Autonomous Cars
Humans make use of myriad “social cues” while on the road, such as establishing eye contact or making inferences about how a driver will behave based on the car’s make and model, Alberto Broggi, a researcher at Italy’s Universita di Parma, told MIT Technology Review. Even if a computer system can recognize something, understanding the context that gives it meaning is much more difficult, said Broggi, who has directed several major European Research Council grants in autonomous driving. For example, a fully autonomous car would need to understand that someone waving his arms by the side of the road is actually a policeman trying to stop traffic.

5 technologies every cloud-ready systems administrator should know
In the last week of June 2014, I had the chance to share a project with worldwide information technology (IT) experts—all of them with a wide breadth of experience in the IT industry. We discussed several topics during those days—of course each expert has a very particular and personal point of view about the market and technologies—but one point that I want to highlight is a fact that all of us agreed on: information technology is an unending journey. Because of this, I’ve started to think on how important it is to be up to date on IT technologies as an IT professional. In this blog post, I want to share my opinion about the five technologies an IT professional must to know to become a cloud-ready systems administrator:

Netmagic Building Reportedly Largest Mumbai Data Center
Netmagic, subsidiary of the Japanese telecom giant NTT Communications, is building a massive data center in Mumbai, which it says will be the largest data center in the area. Netmagic is one of the biggest data center service providers in India. While growth has been slow this year, India’s economy has generally done well in recent years compared to other countries. Strong economy usually means a thriving IT services market, which in turn benefits data center service providers like Netmagic.

Cloud ROI: Why It's Still Hard To Measure
While the 122-year-old General Electric also is "all-in on the cloud," says GE Cloud chief operating officer Chris Drumgoole, its approach is dramatically different from Airbnb's. Unlike Airbnb, the 300,000-employee GE wasn't born in the cloud and must find a way to migrate a massive legacy application infrastructure. GE operates 34 company-owned data centers and runs more than 9,000 applications. It's now consolidating to five data centers and painstakingly evaluating which applications it will rearchitect and move into a private or public cloud, and which ones it will phase out. It's also using software-as-a-service selectively, striking a deal in May, for example, to give employees access to Box online storage.

EBay Is Running Its Own Sociology Experiments
This means more than just the items that show up on the homepage or what auctions are most prominently featured in the mobile app. Demographic and site use data about eBay users is used, Churchill says, not for homepage design but for notifications. The emails users receive from eBay are shaped considerably by demographic information. “Demographic data is used most effectively for notifications and marketing campaigns, rather than algorithmic recommendations,” she added. A big part of this is using data about a user to figure out the sweet spot that will get them to visit eBay more often without annoying them.

Wirelessly Hacking--And Unlocking--Cars Is Easier Than It Should Be
Silvio Cesare, the car-hacking security researcher, explained the whole technique to Wiredrecently. It basically involves tricking the car into thinking that it's being unlocked with the standard wireless key fob, when really it's being pinged with a signal from a software-defined radio attached to a laptop. The radio first finds the frequency that the key fob is using and then cracks the specific mode of encryption using a brute force attack. As Cesare very clearly shows in a video of the exploit, the car pops open after a few keystrokes.

How to Solve Data Fragmentation, or Why to Invest in a Distributed Data Warehouse
The necessary data to lead a data-driven company or strategy is far reaching. It encompasses everything from enterprise financial data quarter-over-quarter to bounce rates week-over-week. Worse, for your individual teams, each department needs different data sets, often visualized to cater to the team with action items dedicated to increasing the productivity and efficiency of said department. In other words, what your sales team uses and what your marketing team uses aren’t often going to be the same data platform, and if it is, its likely that one of those teams is suffering for it.

API Compatibility War Validates Abstraction Approach to Cloud Computing
In addition to the application profile, a key enabler of this abstracted approach is a cloud orchestrator. Often a single, multi-tenant virtual appliance that resides transparently on each supported private or public cloud, this orchestrator is responsible for coordinating the requirements of the application, represented by the output of the application profile, with the best-practice infrastructure and services of the cloud, allowing it to provision its resources in order to deploy the application. In this model, the onus is on the CMP to constantly update its cloud orchestrators to take advantage of innovations of each cloud vendor, who no longer needs to be concerned with breaking API compatibility.

Hackers can tap USB devices in new attacks, researcher warns
The finding shows that bugs in software used to run tiny electronics components that are invisible to the average computer user can be extremely dangerous when hackers figure out how to exploit them. Security researchers have increasingly turned their attention to uncovering such flaws. Nohl said his firm has performed attacks by writing malicious code onto USB control chips used in thumb drives and smartphones. Once the USB device is attached to a computer, the malicious software can log keystrokes, spy on communications and destroy data, he said.

Data Scientist Role Shifting to Focus on Developers
"The developers are the new kingmakers," he adds. "They are unlocking business value by building apps. The data scientist needs to have a new mindset — it's not just about solving big problems in isolation anymore. The mindset has to be: How do I enable these developers?"For his part, Jhingran says he is working to drive that mindset at Apigee. Data scientists there are no longer in data science teams set apart from others. Instead, they've been spread out and now sit with developers in the lines of business.

Quote for the day:

"Leaders don't force people to follow, they invite them on a journey" -- Charles S. Lauer

August 03, 2014

Agile Enterprise Architecture Finally Crosses the Chasm
“It does look like we’re crossing the chasm,” Cockcroft agreed, referring to Geoffrey Moore’s theory about the technology adoption lifecycle. “I’m seeing a few ahead, a lot in the middle, and a few laggards.” Perhaps the central characteristic of this chasm-crossing transition is the shift from early adopters as risk takers to the early majority who doesn’t want to be left behind. Cockcroft continued, “Enterprises face the threat of not doing such transformation – of their competitors running away from them.” As a result, “Enterprise IT has got to catch up quickly.”

Second-generation cloud architecture: breaking the application silo
The cloud as we have come to know it is starting to crack. Like any new technology, it has become a buzzword at the peak of its phase of inflated expectations. Just as early television programs were little more than filmed stage plays, first-generation cloud applications are often just yesterday’s apps in a different data center. But the cloud has grown up, and there are no more excuses for building siloed, brittle applications that can’t exploit all the benefits of distributed, on-demand computing. ... We must change the way application architects and information managers approach application development and integration going forward.

Impossible to Ignore: The importance of IT Governance
The decision framework and the corresponding tools and processes to support them must be clearly communicated so that day-to-day activities and decisions are made within this context. ... Clearly the desired outcomes that shape IT will vary between industries and organizations. For example, some enterprises may focus on product innovation and accelerated go-to-market strategies while others may strive to create operational efficiencies throughout the value chain. CIOs may also encourage management to consider new technologies such as a big data, real-time analytics initiative or social-media-based customer satisfaction programs to support business performance.

PCI DSS v3 compliance – What you should know when completing your SAQ(s)
In the PCI DSS v3.0 SAQs they have added the phrase “merchants confirm that, for this payment channel:” before each of the eligibility criteria. This means that any organisation can fill out multiple SAQs, just making sure that each of their different payment methods (or channels) fit the criteria for one of the SAQs and then completing them. This means that it can be much easier to complete the questionnaires by dividing up the payment channels and concentrating on one at a time.

Why Enterprise Architects Need to Think About Data First
“Enterprise Architecture needs to be the forward, business facing component of IT. Architects need to create a regular structure for IT based on the service and product line functions/capabilities. They need to be connected to their business counterparts. They need to be so tied to the product and service road map that they can tie changes directly to the IT roadmap. Often times, I like to pair a Chief Business Strategist with a Chief Enterprise Architect”. To get there, Enterprise Architects are going to have to think differently about enterprise architecture. Specifically, they need think “data first”

High Performance PHP Application Architecture
Limundo/Kupindo websites daily have more than 300 000 visitors which generate 10 million page views per day. During peak hours around 10 000 users are online simultaneously. On the other side, speed, stability and scalability are three main requirements that need to be matched with a PHP application architecture. Currently, Limundo is a self-configurable High Availability system that achieves page loads of under 1s and 99.999% uptime, while manipulating more than 15 TB of data on a monthly basis. This paper describes software and hardware architecture spread over several server clusters hosted in the private cloud, that makes this possib

UK government recognises datacentre sector as a key economic contributor
“In contrast to other EU countries, the UK has been slow to recognise the importance of a thriving datacentre industry to a country’s economic health,” said Emma Fryer, associate director of Climate Change Programmes at techUK. “However, that has all changed. The treasury has recognised the need to protect future investment and growth by, at least partially, levelling the playing field for UK operators competing with their counterparts overseas.” Climate change agreements (CCAs) are negotiated arrangements between government and energy intensive sectors.

CCOs Take Note: It’s the Culture, Stupid
First, the CCO should report on the company’s culture and message. They need to report on an annual culture survey. If an annual enterprise-wide survey has not been conducted, they need to conduct targeted surveys that measure culture in specific offices, regions, units or even third parties. A CCO should have at least one measure of culture to report to senior management and the Board for each quarter. CCOs have to get creative here and monitor and report on the state of the company’s culture. If the message is getting through, senior management and the Board have to know. If the message is not getting through, then senior management and the Board needs to know that immediately.

The Enterprise Architect as Enterprise Ecologist
The use of systems science and practical offshoots, such as systems thinking is increasingly imperative. While so-called reductionist thinking–breaking a complicated problem down into its component parts and studying how each one specifically acts within the whole — is invaluable at certain scales, such as individual deployable components, it falls apart as one studies complicated systems as a whole. The alternative, expansionist thinking, is more “up-and-out” in nature; start with a component within the system and work “outwards” from there. One way to do this is to build a graph of such interactions for each component, and use those graphs to understand the larger system.

Surviving & Thriving in the Current Risk Management & Regulatory Environment
Systems investment is necessary to reduce operating cost and speed processing. This has a direct benefit when organizations are faced with increased demands for compliance. In fact, in recent years, forward-thinking banks have driven the purchase of origination systems from a risk perspective rather than simply from a focus on operational efficiency, because of the necessity of creating a repeatable, sustainable, and transparent risk management process.

Quote for the day:

"Talent is God-given; be humble. Fame is man-given; be thankful. Conceit is self-given; be careful" -- John Wooden

August 02, 2014

How one judge single-handedly killed trust in the US technology industry
The ruling on Thursday follows from an earlier lower court, in which U.S. Magistrate Judge James Francis in New York ruled that a search warrant can be applied outside the country. The theory was that because Microsoft, named in this case, owned and controlled a foreign subsidiary company based in Dublin, Ireland, any data stored in its overseas offices or datacenters still fell within US territory — albeit loosely. The official channels between countries that allow cross-border law enforcement operations to work, called mutual legal assistance treaties (MLAT), are "generally... slow and laborious," Francis said in his ruling. He added that the "burden" on the US government to work with other nations would be "seriously impeded."

Beyond Localization: Software for a Global Audience
This article is about going beyond localization and delivering software to a truly global audience. Most developers think this can be accomplished simply by translating and localizing the text, but this is not true. This article does not contain source code and is not about the technical aspect of localizing your software. Rather it is about the process and how to prepare your team and software for the necessary changes. Globalizing your software includes adapting for language, dialect, customs, cultural issues, monetary issues, times, dates, formatting, and measurement standards.

Six reasons why cloud computing will transform the way banks serve clients
The EC is also waking up to the possibilities. In a recent policy paper, the EC’s European Cloud Partnership spelt out the need to tackle issues around data, privacy security and legal differences across national boundaries. Its vision is to create a secure environment in which private and public sector organisations can use, buy and sell cloud services. All this momentum is building at a time when banks are under increasing pressure to use their IT budgets more efficiently, while competition from non-bank payments providers is much tougher and the need to serve clients better is becoming more acute. But it is not a technological Valhalla – there are disadvantages too.

Is Silicon Valley’s Image Going Up in Flames?
In a July 28 blog post, Rudder admitted that OkCupid experimented by, at times, removing user pictures or profile texts, and indicating a good match or bad match even though the algorithm showed the opposite. The goal apparently was to find out how much importance is being placed on a user's picture, the power of suggestion, and how effective OkCupid's matching engine works. Ethical questions about secret experimentation be damned. "We noticed recently that people didn’t like it when Facebook 'experimented' with their news feed," writes Rudder in a blog post,

Meet the Engineer: Sravya Tirukkovalur
As Cloudera rightly says in one sentence: It lets you “ask bigger questions”. If you think about how much data we produce every day versus how much we actually process, it is astonishing to imagine how many ways the world could benefit if we had the software capabilities to easily store, process, measure, and learn from all of it. And with more and more new datasets becoming available daily, it is very important for the software to evolve rapidly in terms of scale, performance, usability, and security. I think this rapidity of software development in the Hadoop ecosystem is only possible because of the open source community, and I am very glad to be a part of that community as well as working with the leader, Cloudera.

How to Make Your Department More Data-Friendly
Of course, most organizations or businesses aim to be data-driven. In reality, though, decision-makers aren't the ones primarily using the data. They are instead at the receiving end, where the effectiveness of a data-driven strategy is polished into pretty presentations. We're not here to focus on them. Instead, we're here to focus on the pieces of the business using the data on a day-to-day basis to not only do their jobs better but also do them more effectively. And we're here for them to provide something rarely seen when it comes to big data productivity: a game plan. See, there's a simple way to get started and make your department more data-driven in the process, and it begins with these five steps.

Cloudify Aims To Automate Cloud Troubleshooting
Cloudify has the potential to erase the border between monitoring and orchestration. The new version of Cloudify provides a feedback loop from the monitoring engine to the orchestration engine. When it spots performance falling below expected thresholds, it can notify the orchestration engine, which can "react to monitored events with appropriate corrective measures." While the capability is now part of a re-designed product, it remains to be fleshed out with policies that will provide the guidance for non-manual, automated corrective actions, says Shalom. They are due in the fourth quarter, according to the announcement.

We don’t do that here
Taking a Big Bang approach to becoming FIT is just as foolish as taking a Big Bang approach to delivering large projects. There is far too much risk to go that way. Think of making these changes like the way an airplane’s autopilot works. Trying to hit the runway in Hawaii based on calculations made once in LA is impossible. Not virtually possible but not probable, it is impossible. Not only is there the need for extreme accuracy that would be required if you only take one reading, but there are all the variables of wind speed, direction, atmospheric pressure and others. With all these variables it is impossible to set course once. That is not how autopilot works. The auto pilot systems on airplanes are constantly taking readings against their destination and making small course corrections.

DDoS Attacks Are Still Happening — and Getting Bigger
This is partly because banks have invested in better DDoS mitigation technology and services, observers say. Another factor is that banks are being targeted less frequently — only about 10% of incidents. Gaming, technology and media companies have become more popular targets. But attacks are still being launched against banks and other companies, and with greater force than ever, according to large information security providers such as Prolexic (which is now owned by Akamai), Verizon and Verisign. The three companies recently issued reports that shed light on the changing nature of DDoS attacks.

Ynote Classic - Text and Source Code Editor
The first ynote version consisted of nothing, just a TextBoxcontrol and some basic commands - Cut, Copy, etc. Then I saw the FastColoredTextBox control. TheFastColoredTextBox control was first included in v2.0, supporting only 5 languages. Now, it has just everything a perfect code editor can have. Another reason was to know the capabilities of .NET because I didn't find any decent Text Editor written using the .NET Platform (not including C++) So I mae "Ynote Classic" - The Text Editor, coded with .NET.

Quote for the day:

"Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other." -- John F. Kennedy