September 20, 2015

PowerShell is pretty close to a full-blown programming language in expressive power and the breadth and depth of its lexicon and syntax. Task-oriented code items in PowerShell are called "cmdlets" and there is an amazing variety of pre-fabricated cmdlets available from Microsoft (and other parties) for all kinds of administrative tasks, for everything from Windows configuration and installation, to file and print management, policy management, virtual machine management, and lots, lots, lots more. PowerShell has been around long enough that it's now in its 5th major version, as the output of this PowerShell variable ($PSVersionTable.PSVersion) illustrates:


Android Pay On Android Wear – Everything You Need To Know

Faster, easier purchases without having to take your wallet out of your pocket, connect it to the payment terminal, type in your pin number, make the payment then take it out, put it back in your wallet and back in your pocket. Just tap and pay, 1 second transaction. Another major benefit comes from pre-implemented “loyalty programs”, right into Android Pay and this feature alone is going to revolutionise shopping. Finally, free, instant, person-to-person payments. ... Android Pay can be used with all NFC enabled Android devices, on any mobile carrier, with every “tap and pay ready” location across the US, to start with. At this point, Android Pay supports credit and debit cards from Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover, with worldwide banks enrolling day by day.


How to Balance the Five Analytic Dimensions

Most businesses do not understand how to nuance when it comes to predictive accuracy; however, it will be essential for a Data Scientist to help the organization move beyond the simple notion of accuracy. Obviously we all want to hit the proverbial target. At least directionally, as a Data Scientist, you will want to steer the conversation to something more useful, like an algorithm that produces “high accuracy/low precision” or “high accuracy/high precision”. It usually proves beneficial to the business audience to distinguish what is meant by accuracy and precision as they appear to be close in meaning. Help them see that “accuracy” refers to the closeness of a predicted value to the actual value.


Six Patterns of Big Data and Analytics Adoption

In this white paper, IDC describes lessons learned from interviews and surveys of organizations engaged in Big Data initiatives and the patterns of adoption they have followed to expand existing or initiate new Big Data projects to create value for their organizations. The document highlights the importance of the Big Data architecture to drive improvements and innovation in customer interactions, operational efficiency, and compliance and risk management, among a wide range of business goals and desired outcomes. This white paper utilizes previously published IDC research frameworks such as the IDC Big Data and Analytics Opportunity Matrix and the IDC Big Data and Analytics MaturityScape. Finally, this white paper highlights Oracle Corp.'s Big Data architecture, technology, and services, as well as Oracle customer examples utilizing these offerings.


The evolution of ransomware: From PC Cyborg to a service for sale

In recent years there have been new waves of malware designed to encrypt the user’s information, enabling cybercriminals to demand a ransom payment that will allow the user to decrypt the files, and these are detected by ESET security solutions as filecoders. In 2013, we learned about the importance of CryptoLocker due to the number of infections that occurred in various countries. Its main characteristics include encryption through 2048-bit RSA public key algorithms, the fact that it targets only certain types of file extensions, and the use of C&C communications through the anonymous Tor network. Almost simultaneously, CryptoWall made its appearance and succeeded in outdoing its predecessor in terms of the number of infections, partly due to the attack vectors employed


This Technology Is About To Make Us All Way More Productive

Machine learning lets a computer continually adapt itself to your inputs so it can keep improving its results. Another excellent example of this is found in Apple’s new iPhone operating system. Engineered with what Apple bills as more “proactive” intelligence, iOS 9 pushes apps that you often use in certain situations to your lock screen for easy access. So if you tend to listen to podcasts on your commute to work, it might suggest you open Stitcher every morning around the time you leave home. ... “We’re at the early stages of applying machine learning to productivity,” says Tim Porter, founder of Gluru, a startup building a smart personal assistant for people’s daily workflow.


Awesome Feature of AOP in Spring

AOP modularity means method does call crosscutting object instead crosscutting class methods are expressed in such a way that it calls itself wherever it is required. I am going to explain how it works. I am not going to deal with setting up environment or with detailed use of AOP. My main objective of this tip is to tell Spring developers who have not used it before about AOP. AOP seems complicated but it is quite easy to use and provides a very powerful feature. This tip shows how with the use of some simple keywords we can achieve AOP. I am not deep diving into setting up environment. Once a Spring developer can understand the simplicity of AOP, then setting up an environment would not be a tough task.


Four Must-Have Rules for Scaling Enterprise Agile

Agile methodologies long ago proved their efficiency with small co-located teams, hitting home with the flexibility and velocity that come naturally to such teams. But when it comes to moving past team level to organizational scale, Agile practices are up against enterprise development realities like distributed teams, multi-component projects and traditional resource management. As a matter of fact, to adopt Agile practices, specifically Scrum, no organization is too big, complex or distributed. Scrum practices scale perfectly well to fit complex enterprises of more than 100 people, provided due attention is paid to organize the transition process. Here are four rules to follow when implementing Agile at the multi-team enterprise level.


A Kick-SaaS Enterprise Encryption Strategy

When data is inside your four walls, so to speak, you put trust in your own employees, the infrastructure and security solutions that you select, and the policies that you create to secure it. But as information moves to the cloud, data physically resides in infrastructures owned and managed by another entity – and that trust goes into someone else’s hands, infrastructure and security policy decisions. That is, unless you and your SaaS provider take a new approach. Recent mega-breaches (think: Anthem, Sony) have proven that hackers are after one thing: data. By using encryption, SaaS providers can render sensitive data unusable to hackers. However, encryption alone is not enough. Access controls and key management can also prove to be weak points in a SaaS provider’s defenses.


The IoT, Data and the Principle of Great Expectations

Call it the “Principle of Great Expectations”” the greater the hype or estimated market size, the higher the likelihood of a rapid proliferation of products that are “tragically pathetic.” Products are often developed simply because certain technologies have become available, without a lot of thought given to why users need them or how to make them delightful to use. Take, for example, one of today’s most successful product categories: the tablet. The first product in this category, the GRiDPad, was introduced in September 1989. It was followed by other unsuccessful attempts to crack the tablet market, including the Apple Newton, in 1993, and the enterprise-oriented Microsoft Tablet PC, in 2002. It wasn’t until 2010, when Apple introduced the iPad, that the tablet became a successful mainstream product, appealing to both consumers and business users.



Quote for the day:

"If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing." -- Malcolm Gladwell

September 19, 2015

Linda Rising on Continuous Retrospectives

The idea is that in the normal retrospective, there are lots of exercises that we do and one of my favorites is called the Timeline. I am sure you have seen it. You use cards or stickies of different colors and you begin. If it is a reiteration retrospective, you begin with the beginning of the iteration and you put the date and then the end date and then across the time line you put the stickies or the cards that reflect events and they are of different colors. Then you reflect back and you use that to drive actions that you are going to take at the end of the retrospective because, unfortunately, most of us, not just old people like me, cannot remember what happened. So it is an exercise to help you remember what happened.


Wearables Are Dead, Long Live Wearable Tech!

Obviously, the mass market understands little of how the wearable technology works, what’s inside those little gadgets and frankly, why should they care? But for us, the ones with a vision, the ones who see a layer or two deeper inside these devices, for those of us looking for new markets, new business ideas, the question remains: Is there anything beyond a Fitbit bracelet or the latest Apple Watch? We’ve listened to Laurenti de’ Medici, our CEO, speaking at Digital Catapult a couple of weeks ago about the constant changes in wearable tech landscape, about “wearables” as we know them nowadays – fitness trackers, NFC rings, smartwatches – slowly morphing into embedded, ingestibles, implantables and smart sensors; logical changes leading to disruption, leading to new trends, new markets, new jobs, new industries such as fashion tech and digital health.


Facebook’s Cyborg Virtual Assistant Is Learning from Its Trainers

M can do those things because the software hands off things it can’t do to human operators known as “trainers.” Sometimes a trainer has to do all the work, but M is also capable of digesting queries it recognizes but can’t handle into easy-to-process summaries that make a trainer’s work more efficient. Right now this model is not efficient enough for M to be more than just an experiment, because it requires too many human workers. But Alex Lebrun, who leads the team working on Facebook’s assistant, says that it can become a real product because the work of the human trainers is gradually teaching the software how to do a greater share of the work. LeBrun and his team joined Facebook when the social network acquired the startup he cofounded,


Not enough IT specialists: RBA chief

"The market for the kind of IT skills you need to build payment systems seems to be pretty hot right now because you've got four big institutions and then some smaller ones like us dipping into that pool," he told the House of Representatives economics committee on Friday. A Greythorn study from last year predicted that Australia would head into a "huge" skills shortage within the next five years. The survey said Australia was at risk of losing its IT professionals to the overseas market. However, the most recent Skills Shortages Australia report by the Australian Department of Employment said there was no skills shortage in the ICT sector in Australia. "Demand for ICT professionals is subdued and employers have little difficulty recruiting workers who meet their skill level expectations,"


Where’s The Money in Data? (Part II)

If the focus of the problem to be solved is internal and the state is existing, then the defined monetization opportunity is business optimization. When using data for business optimization, the value generation and recognition is not defined by revenue dollars or asset assessments for accounting ledgers. The monetized value of data in business optimization is defined by reducing costs or improving productivity in business operations. While the value of business optimization can certainly be defined in monetary terms, the value can also be recognized in soft terms such as increased employee satisfaction, reduced time and effort, or increased accuracy and quality all of which have significant value for the overall business.


Project Management 101: The Complete Guide to Agile, Kanban, Scrum and Beyond

Although most of us will never be tasked with goals of such scope, many of us have to manage projects in one way or another. The Project Management Institute estimates there will be more than 15 million new project manager positions added to the global job market by 2020—and many of the rest of us will still have smaller projects to manage on our own. Project Management, simplified, is the organization and strategic execution of everything that needs to get done to tackle a finite goal—on time and within budget. Whether developing new software, carrying out a marketing campaign, or landing a human on Mars, project management is what gets you to your goal.


San Francisco’s darling Salesforce dreams of superstar status

“We’re trying to create a bit of diversity away from the big whoops and high fives,” Loftis says. She adds that while Salesforce tends to be lauded by customers, the notion that deploying services is simple is wrong: companies need to put in a fair amount of effort to get the best return on investment possible. “Users don’t necessarily feel they’re getting a lot of value for the data they’re being asked to put into the system. On ROI, it’s not that people feel they’re not getting enough but people say ‘this takes more investment than we thought it would’. It’s not just licensing and implementation; adoption and the change management perspective need to be factored in. There’s a misconception that Salesforce ‘just works’.”


Machine Learning and Cognitive Computing

Many machine learning solutions have already been developed, and they are continually being improved. I spent some time at Microsoft Research doing some early work in Bayesian reasoning and machine learning. We built a solution for traffic modeling that was spun out as Microsoft Research’s first startup company, called INRIX, which now provides real-time and predicted traffic information around the world. I see three tiers of commercial engagement with these types of technologies. For one group of companies, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, these technologies are strategic, and their investment is a hundredfold or more than it would be from a more conventional business.


How Applications Takes Advantage of Holes in Legacy Network Security Solutions

These attacks may go undetected and this “noisy traffic” can significantly slow legitimate traffic or cause network outages. With legacy systems, mitigation requires labor-intensive manual intervention because there’s no automated method to handle the threat. If and when network security solutions do sense a NetFlow-based volumetric attack with an application component, manual mitigation can take 15 to 20 minutes. By the time the security team has developed a strategy, the attackers have likely morphed to new signatures.


The future of business intelligence as a service with GoodData and HP Vertica

The datasets themselves also tend to be born in the cloud. As I said, the types of applications that we're building typically focus on sales and marketing and social, and e-commerce related data, all of which are very, very popular, cloud-based data sources. And you can imagine they're growing like crazy.  We see a leaning in our customer base of integrating some on-premise information, typically from their legacy systems, and then marrying that up with the Salesforce, or the market data or social information that they want to integrate and build a full view of their customers -- or a full exposure of what their own applications are doing.



Quote for the day:

"There are only two kinds of [programming] languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." -- Bjarne Stroustrup

September 18, 2015

Hadoop's a matter of innovation, not cost

Saving money? That gets just 17% of the votes, with an almost equal number (14%) citing the need to drive revenue, not save money, as their motivation to get smart with Hadoop. This is particularly interesting, since those companies with the most experience running Hadoop tend to use it for ETL functions (74%), followed by business intelligence (65%) and data science (62%). As mentioned above, in its early days, Hadoop was often dismissed as ETL for companies too cheap to pay for Informatica, IBM, or Oracle. In a shift, those that have yet to deploy Hadoop now look primarily for its value to transform BI (69%), not ETL (51%). Clearly, word is getting around that Hadoop, if ever it was a cheap way to do ETL, is much more than that.


It’s Not Big Data, It’s The Right Data 

Data aggregation and predictive intelligence at the scale needed for today’s enterprises requires use of machine learning for predictive modeling. Machine learning means training a machine to associate known patterns with known outcomes, and then when the machine sees new patterns it can predict new, unknown outcomes. Machine learning is really about adjusting the knobs of the predictive intelligence engine to get it closer to the right answer. Using machine learning, we’re able to now test whether or not specific actions will take place and to predict a company’s likelihood to buy and offer other data such as time to close or products reviewed. B2B marketing and sales teams can use these predictions to target the right accounts. Machine learning makes it possible to extract meaning from huge and chaotic piles of data.


A Beginner’s Guide to Embedded Data Analytics

This abridged guide will cover the essential things to look out for in selecting and purchasing embedded analytics software. The full guide is available here. Whether you’re producing automation software, SaaS products or cloud applications, it’s likely to assume you’re collecting a lot of data in the process. With an increasing number of companies and individuals understanding the value of using data to improve different aspects of their business, the ability to offer a powerful data analytics and BI feature within your existing application can give your product the competitive edge that it needs and greatly improve the value you offer to customers


Writing Libraries for the Modern Web

With this latest version of the SDK, we found ourselves special-casing even more code for specific platforms, and we came to a conclusion: just release different builds for different versions. Using Babel plugins, we inject variables into the code and use dead code elimination to remove disabled branches (take a look at the end of Storage.js for an example). Making a build-time split seemed less than ideal at first, but it allowed us to ensure that our developers got exactly the features they wanted, without having to rely on potentially flaky feature-detection code. With 1.6, the npm module provides three different packages: plain old 'parse' for browsers, 'parse/node' for Node.js, and'parse/react-native' for React Native Apps. This will let us add more platform-specific features down the road.


Grafters with a hint of genius: What makes a really great IT pro?

"Technical skills can be learned but attitude is an innate personal philosophy that drives enthusiasm, customer focus, problem solving and elements like team work, quality and innovative thinking," says Behenna. "The digital revolution - for want of a less hackneyed and overtraded phrase - depends, for its success, on the spark that begins with attitude then commingles with aptitude to deliver game-changing thinking, products and services." ... "You need people who are delighted to work for an organisation that has strived to create an environment that links individual ambition to the company's success," says Behenna. "No hyperbole, just grafters with a hint of genius. That's what I would want from IT professionals."


This European country is the center for FinTech startups

For many FinTech startups, operating in Switzerland makes a lot of sense. The nation boasts an incredibly stable economy, a strong reputation for innovation, and an emphasis on security and privacy. On top of that, the Bitcoin is a legitimate foreign currency there, meaning there is no legal uncertainty about using it within the country. In fact, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) authorized the Bitcoin stock exchange (ECUREX) in May, facilitating the exchange from Swiss Francs to Bitcoin. The new draft of the provision will address virtual currencies and go into effect at the beginning of 2016. According to Switzerland Global Enterprise, other advantages include the nation's liberal laws, loosely regulated labor market, high security, and excellent free-trade policies.


Rep. Hurd’s Hearing at UTSA to Focus on ‘State of the Cloud’

“It’s not quite clear how the cloud will evolve, there is a lot of R&D that needs to be done to make the cloud available to everyone,” Agrawal said in an interview. “The cloud is a market disrupter, as a big a disrupter as the personal computer was in the 1980s. “Whole business models will change because there will be much greater focus on data services,” Agrawal said. “Right now, the cloud is not technologically optimized for high performance computing, but eventually what runs on super computers today will run on the cloud. There is an enormous amount of software and hardware development to be done, and UTSA with its Open Cloud Institute and cybersecurity programs aims to be the university that will provide the smart workers the industry will desperately need. ...”


Adapt or die: Can your IT department survive the age of fast IT?

Business executives are increasingly moving to an IT environment that is no longer focused on large complex projects but is oriented towards shorter, more sustainable efforts to drive change and innovation. This is known as "Fast IT." The goal is to promote efficiency, agility and innovation to enable IT departments to stay ahead of - and help promote - the rapid pace of dynamic change. "To deploy Fast IT is to unify infrastructure to reduce network complexity and speed up service deployment," David Meads, Cisco Africa VP, explained in an article on ITWeb. "Fast IT has three streams: software and automation, a converged and consistent infrastructure, and a flexible consumption model which enables scaling in a modular way that allows rapid growth without compromising efficiency. The key principles of fast IT are 'simple, smart, and secure."


Big data projects gaining steam, but not due to the CIO

"People are becoming aware of the value of data, not just in IT but overall," Gartner analyst and report co-author Nick Heudecker, who conducted the research in June, told CIO.com. "They're creating data and using it as a competitive advantage." ... Increasingly, CFOs, CMOs, COO, and chief data officers are introducing such analytics projects at their organizations, as they endeavor to meet CEO mandates to learn more about customers, Heudecker and co-author Lisa Kart wrote in their report. In 2015, CIOs triggered 32 percent of the big data projects, with business unit heads kicking off 31 percent of the projects. That's a shift from 2014, when research suggested that CIOs initiated 37 percent of big data projects, compared to 25 percent of projects that were started by business line leaders.


Solving the Big Data “Abandonment” Problem

Given the strategic imperative from the c-suite to harness the power of big data, why do the majority of these projects fail? Gartner estimates the failure rate to be nearly 60 percent. Similarly, Capgemini finds that only 27 percent of executives believe big data projects succeed and of those only 8 percent are “very” successful. If adoption of big data is not the problem, what is? It seems that turning adoption into value for an organization remains elusive. Often, organizations fail to see justifiable ROI from their big data investments because no clear blueprint exists for how to take a project from inception to completion with delivering value in mind.



Quote for the day:

“The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity.” -- Tom Peters

September 17, 2015

How to use big data to transform IT operations

Generally it’s more efficient and cost-effective to perform processing near where the data resides. We’ve seen large companies use cloud-based services for IT operations data. If the data itself originates in the same cloud, this approach is fine. Even data generated on-premises can be stored and analyzed in the cloud if it’s small enough. For large amounts of data generated outside the cloud, however, problems arise. For example, one organization had to purchase dedicated bandwidth just to upload the telemetry. Even then, there was so much data at times, the local forwarders would fall behind, and it would be hours before the data was available. In cases such as this one, it’s important to understand data gravity and process the data near where it’s generated.


It’s time to patch our human firewall

A recent security survey revealed that 31% of all information security incidents were employee–related. This statistic includes the nefarious actor, as well as the reckless and duped. Regardless, the fact remains that employees are a juicy attack vector for the miscreant, and, if the weakness comes in human form, it can render the technical controls in place moot. ... We need employees to have their awareness heightened to the threat environment so that an automatic ‘gut check’ kicks in whenever they’re talking about the business online. Sadly, it is far beyond the remit of this short piece to explore the best way to achieve this, but I will leave you with this final thought that I have again lifted from the survey, which nicely sums up where I wanted to go with this: “Another worrisome finding is a diminished commitment to employee training and awareness programmes.”


Taking the Long-view: The VR Future Starts in 2016

The development of this market, which is a parallel track to the development of this technology, will depend upon a clear narrative for consumers to understand. This is about more then the killer apps, or the best field of view. This is about grasping ahold of this incredible open hardware development phenomenon we’ve had the chance to experience these past few years and turning that into just the prologue for the immersive revolution to come. And I’m not just concerned about moms and dads making purchasing decisions for their families, I’m also concerned with tech savvy skeptics who think that VR is just the latest version of 3-D TVs. If we apply Hollywood blockbuster mentality to the product launches of the Rift or the Vive—really of any of the HMD’s—we’re almost guaranteeing a wave of negative press.


Who needs Windows 10 Pro: 5 reasons to upgrade

Windows 10 Professional doesn’t take anything away from Home users; it simply adds more sophisticated features. It’s a costly choice, though: $99 for a Windows 10 Pro Pack that takes you from a licensed copy of Windows 10 Home to the Professional version. This applies to Windows 7 Starter, Windows 7 Home Basic, Windows 7 Home Premium, or Windows 8.1 users, who are only eligible for Windows 10 Home. ... All of them have some relevance for power users and more traditional businesses alike. While there are dozens of differences (check our review of Windows 10 for the details), five key aspects of Windows 10 Professional will help you decide whether the upgrade is worth it for you.


Android Wear Now Works With Apple’s iOS

Android Wear is compatible with most iPhones (iPhone 5, 5c, 5s, 6, or 6 Plus running iOS 8.2+)Google’s decision is not surprising considering the ongoing “war” between iOS and Android, not to mention the potential value of user-generated data, but the move ultimately hurts iPhone owners who prefer Android Wear devices over Apple Watch. Reluctance to concede data is not something new especially in the digital health landscape. Fitbit, for example, has long refused to support HealthKit. Full HealthKit integration is at a level seen with third-party fitness devices and Apple’s own Watch product allows for cross-app data sharing, a feature important to information aggregation and a streamlined user experience.


Apple's secret NoSQL sauce includes a hefty dose of Cassandra

It's telling, as Sandeep Parikh hints, that Apple ran into enough limitations with traditional relational databases, including the likelihood that they "cost way too much to scale out," such that it actively uses Cassandra, MongoDB, and other NoSQL technologies. Heck, Apple even went so far as to buy the company behind FoundationDB, a NoSQL database. As my former MongoDB colleague (and Wall Street analyst) Peter Goldmacher stressed to me in an interview, "It is reasonable to wonder if Apple's software products would have even been possible without NoSQL technologies." Central among those, at perhaps double the adoption (very roughly extrapolating from job listings), is Cassandra. Most companies don't have Apple's scale, but for those that aspire to them,


Defining the ‘A’ in Agile Enterprise Architecture

Don’t be frightened by the word “chaos,” cautions Diginomica’s Charlie Bess. A more accurate description would be dynamic or agile architecture, akin to the more flexible side of Gartner’s “bimodal” approach that has traditional applications and services on a more clearly defined stack while emerging functions define their own requirements. In this scenario, the most important element is a single, overriding view of the entire system that allows the enterprise to leverage all resources for the benefit of decision-makers, not IT admins. An agile architecture is not to be confused with the Agile movement within the Enterprise Architecture field, says tech blogger Charles Betz on The Data Administration Newsletter. The movement consists of a number of software methodologies that have been devised under the precepts of the Agile Manifesto,


Skills Framework for TOGAF & SCOR Part 1 – TOGAF Framework Overview

TOGAF provides a skills framework that can assist in preparing role definitions and planning training. However, there are several ways that it could be expanded, and in this post I examine what they are. The TOGAF skills framework appears in chapter 52, the final chapter of TOGAF (this may be why so many people forget its existence). It defines roughly 75 skills, grouped into the headings of Generic Skills, Business Skills & Methods, Enterprise Architecture Skills, Program or Project Management Skills, IT General Knowledge Skills, Technical IT Skills, Legal Environment. These skills are then plotted against 9 specific roles


Leadership, Mentoring and Team Chemistry

What we cannot have is the same pace of change and chaos that is common in the work we do reflected in the teams themselves. High turnover, micromanaging, and a high tempo of change in the daily or weekly goals are each things that will kill a team. To counter this the leaders in each team who step-up to take on different roles need to provide stability. This include the official (tech leads, managers, and directors) and the unofficial (experienced engineers who’ve earned the respect of their peers) leaders. Teams only succeed in chaos when they’re founded on stability. Otherwise they’ve either just been lucky or they’re heading towards burn out.


Contractors Say Proposed Hack Reporting Rules Aren't Strict Enough

"We view the current draft version of the guidance as being too little, too late and too flexible," council president Stan Soloway said in comments dated Sept. 10. "This is exactly the interpretive, decentralized behavior that has produced the current state of network security vulnerabilities." Contractors in recent years have been hit by hacks that compromised federal employee retirement plan data, background check investigations and U.S. Transportation Command documents, to name a few.  Soloway said the new Office of Management and Budget draft guidance offers too little in the way of uniform terms and conditions, offering "only generalized statements with explicit authority for agencies to deviate from it almost at will.”



Quote for the day:

"The signs of outstanding leadership are found among the followers." -- Max DePree

September 16, 2015

Invisible revolution: How wearables are quietly invading the enterprise

The study, The State of Enterprise Wearable Adoption, focused on the IT or business decision makers in 201 companies with 500 to more than 5,000 employees, and from a range of industries. The industrial enterprise sector was the focus of the study, with government, non-profit, education, professional services, media, hospitality, health care and financial services industries excluded since those areas do not have a direct use for wearables relevant to the study. The 93% of companies interested in wearables are split across almost every industry included, with manufacturing and life sciences "very big" and transportation and retail smaller than anticipated, Ballard said.


5 Ways Big Data Is Making a Splash in the Insurance Industry

Leveraging Big Data insights is well known for its ability to provide quality prospects for businesses, but another lesser known feature is its ability to shed light on low quality prospects or frustrated clients. Advanced analytics tools allow insurers to target individuals who are apt to be a long term loyal customer, and also to weed out individuals who are a high risk of canceling coverage. Predictive analytics is used to track and reveal signal behaviors that indicate an impending cancellation. This allows insurance agents to reach out to unhappy consumers before their final decision has been made, and tailor opportunities to encourage them to stay with the company.


What's New in iOS 9: New SDK Frameworks

Although the new SDK does not introduce as many new or enhanced features as iOS 8, which included more than 4,000 new APIs, it does still provide a wealth of new functionality and enhancements. Along with the new SDK, iOS 9 is also marked by new developer tools to support some of its features, and new releases of Apple’s major programming languages, Swift and Objective-C. This series aims at introducing all that is essential for developers to know about building apps for the latest release of Apple’s mobile OS. It comprises five articles that will cover what’s new in iOS 9 SDK, new features in Swift, Objective-C, and developer tools, and Apple’s new bitcode.


The science of organizational transformations

The latest findings suggest that investing time and effort up front to design a transformation’s initiatives also matters. According to the new results, the most effective initiatives involve four key actions: role modeling, fostering understanding and conviction, reinforcing changes through formal mechanisms, and developing talent and skills. These actions are critical to shifting mind-sets and behaviors. But it’s not enough to design a portfolio of initiatives based on one, or even two, of these actions. When executives report that their companies used all four, the odds of a successful transformation are much higher than if just one were used. The process of howinitiatives are designed is critical too.


High-Potential Employees: 3 Ways to Get More From Your HIPO Program

CEB data show that HIPOs produce 91% more valuable work for the company and exert 21% more effort than non-HIPOs. Managers are right to worry about identifying them (only 1-in-7 high performing employees classify as HIPOs) and to worry twice as much about keeping hold of them, and developing them so that all that glittering potential is realized. And it’s not only their managers. A full 50% of HR professionals worry about their company’s HIPO program (the initiatives in place to identify, retain, and develop HIPOs). HR teams ask questions like, “My high-potential program is expensive – am I investing in the right people?”, “How should we prepare our HIPOs to take on more challenging senior roles in the future?” and, “Why is my high-potential program not working? People we thought of as high-potential are failing when placed into more senior roles.”


Cisco router break-ins bypass cyber defenses

Routers are attractive to hackers because they operate outside the perimeter of firewalls, anti-virus, behavioral detection software and other security tools that organizations use to safeguard data traffic. Until now, they were considered vulnerable to sustained denial-of-service attacks using barrages of millions of packets of data, but not outright takeover. "If you own (seize control of) the router, you own the data of all the companies and government organizations that sit behind that router," FireEye Chief Executive Dave DeWalt told Reuters of his company's discovery. "This is the ultimate spying tool, the ultimate corporate espionage tool, the ultimate cybercrime tool," DeWalt said.


Deception May Be the Best Way to Catch Cybercriminals

"You could do things like emulate an Apache server and make it look like Apache is running somewhere when it isn't," Pingree said. "Or you could run a real copy of Apache that's monitored." As soon as an attacker sends data to the honeypot, it issues an alert. The attacker will most likely start rummaging around, performing passive scans of hosts on the network. The beauty of a honeypot is, legitimate users know it is fake. So the only people accessing it are cybercriminals and hackers, meaning there are no false positives, there is no need to filter out the noise that occurs in most fraud-detection systems. "The biggest problem with security-transaction monitoring is you have to filter out what's good and what's bad," Pingree said. "But if it's a decoy, everyone that's hitting it is bad."


What’s Wrong with the Mainframe?

Despite its technical and economic superiority to distributed platforms, a surprising number of industry voices still contextualize the mainframe as a “legacy” platform from which enterprises need to migrate their core applications if they are to succeed in the digital economy. This makes no sense. First of all, why would any organization migrate its most critical applications from a supremely reliable, secure, scalable and secure platform to a relatively risky and expensive one? And why would any CIO allocate limited resources to a low- or negative-ROI migration project when so many other urgent imperatives clamor for his or her limited IT resources? The answer is that there is no reason. That’s why analysts like Gartner are reporting minimal migration activity—and why 88% of CIOs assert that their mainframes will run existing and even net new workloads for at least another decade.


Customer engagement takes a step forward with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016

For many of us, the concepts of customer engagement and customer resource management (CRM) are murky at best. We understand the general idea, and we appreciate the results when customers are happy and buying, but the mechanics of how those sales are accomplished are lost to us. And, for the most part, that is okay, because we don't really need to know how it all comes together. However, if you're a salesperson, the tools provided by applications like Microsoft Dynamics CRM are vital to your success. Without those tools, sales are not made, revenues are not realized, commissions are not calculated, and people don't earn a living. With that being said, for an enterprise of any size operating in today's highly competitive environment, a well-designed CRM solution is required for any sort of success.


Where’s The Money in Data? (Part I)

All data monetization efforts require that data is ultimately used to drive actions or decisions that solve a problem for an end consumer. This fundamental requirement is where most businesses fail when attempting to monetize data because the typical approach is “How can we sell data to increase our revenues?” which assumes that the value is the sale of the data itself. In order to successfully monetize data, organizations must flip this approach and start with the end in mind. The questions should be “What problem can our data solve?” and “How valuable would it be to the end consumer if these problems were solved?” It is important to note that “end consumer” does not always mean customer either. Monetized data solutions can be for internal end consumers as well.



Quote for the day:

"Cream always rises to the top...so do good leaders" -- John Paul Warren

September 15, 2015

Enterprise data architecture strategy and the big data lake

Data virtualization's use of defined semantic models to represent a converged view of original sources addresses both of the issues with accessing data in a data lake. Federating access to data in a data lake eliminates the need for users to rewrite their applications to include code to read the data from the data lake, reducing the need for data replication. Existing applications can target the semantic model, making the source of the data transparent to the consuming application. At the same time, data virtualization hides the complexity of schema-on-read by allowing each user to apply specific data normalization and transformation rules to the data to produce the "renderings" that are suited for each application use.


The new art of war: How trolls, hackers and spies are rewriting the rules of conflict

To put it another way: cyberwarfare models are maturing in the same way that other technologies mature. To take a more prosaic example, the evolution of cyberwarfare is a lot like the cycle e-commerce went through. There was a lot of initial excitement and investment from retailers in building separate e-commerce operations or businesses, but gradually these became not just a standard part of their operation but for many retailers the core of their business, just as cyberwarfare planning and strategy is gradually becoming a part of mainstream military planning. However that doesn't mean that all countries are taking the same approach to strategy or that they even agree on what should be included in the term cyberwarfare.


First Detailed Public Map of U.S. Internet Backbone Could Make It Stronger

Knowing the exact location of the most important Internet cables should help efforts to understand the possible effects of natural disasters or intentional attacks on the Internet, for example. Barford says he is also talking with researchers and people at telecommunications companies about the idea of adding extra fiber links that would be shared by different companies. They’d be located at key points where new fiber between major population centers could significantly improve the resilience and efficiency of the Internet. Although the Internet is publicly accessible, it is woven together from many privately owned networks that interoperate. Telecommunications companies sometimes show schematics of their core networks, but without much geographic detail.


How new data-collection technology might change office culture

The obvious fear for many employees is that data collected would not be anonymous and, instead, could be used for hiring, firing and promotion considerations. The growing market for these types of tools is sure to spawn imitators who might not uphold the same privacy safeguards. Privacy advocates shuddered when a software developer recently boasted that it would be possible for employers to peek into the emails and messages sent through Microsoft's Lync messaging system. "You can become your own mini-NSA," David Tucker, CEO of Australian-based Event Zero, told Network World. Managers could see which employees are dating and which ones are seeking out their next job. "Just make sure it doesn't end up on WikiLeaks," he advised.


Case study: Philips takes agile approach to building bridges between business and IT

“Over a longer period, it’s easier to miss a few edges. The financial impact is also much greater as you need a lot of management to keep everything on track in a six- to nine-month project,” says van Zoelen. “The amount of code we throw away is limited so we save money. I would almost say everything we do now is focused on delivering the most value possible.” For this reason, and since throwing its weight behind agile in 2011, the company claims to have made savings in the region of €47m as project lead times have fallen from 54 business days to 20. Over this same period of time, the number of teams involved has also grown from seven to 120. Within the teams are high levels of engagement and – because everyone is clear about what they should be doing – the working environment is largely positive, says van Zoelen.


RoboEthics – We Need Universal Robot Rights, Ethics And Legislation

Is it ok to torture or murder a robot? We form such strong emotional bonds with machines that people can’t be cruel to them even though they know they are not alive. So should robots have rights? Mistreating certain kinds of robots could soon become unacceptable in the eyes of society. In what circumstance would it be OK to torture or murder a robot? And what would it take to make you think twice before being cruel to a machine? ... There is a new emerging technology called quantitative legal prediction. It turns out that experienced lawyers often add a lot of value by making predictions. Using big data, complex analytics, robots will be best at “predicting” if you’re going to win a case, or that the case will be overturned on appeal, for example.


Can training transform CISOs into business leaders?

“If you look at other C-suite roles – CEO, CFO, CMO – these have been established for decades, creating defined paths to success. The CISO has been around for roughly 10 to 15 years, but it didn’t come to prominence until the last few years, and then as a technical role.” And technical skills, he added, while key to the “functional” success of a CISO, “do not lend themselves well to the business acumen and communication skills needed to work with your typical C-suite today. The main shift needed is towards thinking in terms of risk, not technology, and how this risk relates to various aspects of the business.” Christiansen agrees, to the point that he said the job is getting a different title. “The role of the CISO is evolving to the chief information risk officer (CIRO),” he said.


Don't underestimate the network's importance in manufacturing analytics and IoT

The practice on manufacturing floors was to leave choices about networking topology and machine-to-machine (M2M) interconnections to vendors, but as this dialogue moves into internal ERP and other higher-level office systems that support analytics and dashboards, corporate IT will be involved. There are two flavors of Internet of Things (IoT) communications in manufacturing environments: an IP-based network that is hard-wired and that interconnects machines on the floor with the ability to move information to the internet; and a more localized communications scheme where devices in immediate proximity to each other communicate through wireless technology like Bluetooth or over wired Ethernet.



Why Agile Didn’t Work

On the top is the lofty goal of “satisfying customers by satisfying their constant changing requirements”. We achieve this goal by “delivering working software frequently”. To deliver working software, though, requires significant technical and managerial support. Ensuring that changing requirements do not break the system and slow down development is foremost a technical issue: how to design the system in a way that is flexible and how to create automation that ensures changes do not break things. To foster advanced technical skills in teams, teams have to be motivated to learn from their mistakes and to develop themselves.



Shadow IT risks heightened in hybrid cloud

Shadow IT risks are heightened when combined with hybrid cloud. Most companies have data security and compliance practices to protect not only their own information, but that of their customers and suppliers. These practices and policies assume that data is contained within a controlled environment. But if users create a hybrid cloud workflow that connects shadow IT software as a service (SaaS) applications to highly structured applications, they can violate security and governance requirements – a risk known as bandit hybridization. The dangers of bandit hybridization are growing for two reasons. First, SaaS adoption is increasing, and line departments can easily adopt SaaS applications without IT support.



Quote for the day:

"Nothing so conclusively proves a man's ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself." -- Thomas J. Watson

September 14, 2015

Getting started with open source machine learning

Common machine learning tasks include classification (applying labels to items), clustering (grouping items automatically), and topic detection. It is also commonly used in natural language processing. Machine learning is increasingly being used in a wide variety of use cases, including content recommendation, fraud detection, image analysis and ecommerce. It is useful across many industries and most popular programming languages have at least one open source library implementing common ML techniques. Reflecting the broader push in software towards open source, there are now many vibrant machine learning projects available to experiment with as well as a plethora of books, articles, tutorials, and videos to get you up to speed.


Don't get too excited about superfast 5G wireless yet

It's a bit of rerun from the last advent of new wireless technology. In 2008, Verizon was the first in the US to lead the charge to the variant of 4G technology called Long-Term Evolution, or LTE, and it launched its service to consumers two years later. At the time, AT&T also downplayed the immediate benefits of 4G, noting that early devices would be clunky and would quickly run through their batteries. Eventually, the move to 4G LTE by both Verizon and AT&T helped drive a jump in mobility, ushering in the rise of sophisticated smartphones and mobile programs and services that are now integral to our lives. The hope is that 5G, which will bring speeds that are higher than what Google Fiber offers through a superfast landline connection, will usher in a new revolution.


APIs Are The New FTEs

Imagine the power of tools such as Bubble. While their tagline, “build your startup by pointing and clicking,” might not be applicable to everyone today, I strongly believe that within 10 years we will see at least one unicorn built without writing a single line of code. APIs are truly democratizing startup creation. Not only will you practically need no money to get started, you won’t need any tech skills either. All you will need is a keen understanding of the user and how to take your product to market. Of course, this has major implications in terms of pace of product development, and the consequent noise in the market, but net-net it’s great for consumers. Anyone with a great idea anywhere in the world can build a billion-dollar tech company. That’s exciting!


The Value of Storage Management

We’ll learn more about how HTC lowers total storage utilization cost while bringing in a common management view to improve problem resolution, automate resources allocation, and more fully gain compliance -- as well as set the stage for broader virtualization and business continuity benefits. ... From a performance standpoint, our former primary storage platform was not great at telling us how close we were to the edge of our performance capabilities. We never knew exactly what was going to cause a problem or the unpredictability of virtual workloads in particular. We never knew where we were going to have issues. Being able to see into that has allowed us to prevent help desk cost for slow services, for problems that maybe we didn’t even know were going on initially.


A Video-Game Algorithm to Solve Online Abuse

To truly curb abuse, Riot designed punishments and disincentives to persuade players to modify their behavior. For example, it may limit chat resources for players who behave abusively, or require players to complete unranked games without incident before being able to play top-ranked games. The company also rewards respectful players with positive reinforcement. Lin firmly believes that the lessons he and his team have learned from their work have broader significance. “One of the crucial insights from the research is that toxic behavior doesn’t necessarily come from terrible people; it comes from regular people having a bad day,” says Justin Reich, a research scientist from Harvard’s Berkman Center, who has been studying Riot’s work.


The ‘missing link’: Do your processes support strategy?

It is easy to be drawn into an illusion that all organisations in a particular industry or sub-sector must have identical processes. If we were to examine the airline industry, for example, it is likely that all airlines will have processes enabling tickets to be booked, passengers to be boarded, aircraft to be cleaned ready for their next flight and so on. Yet whilst all airlines might have these processes, the activities, goals and measures each airline deem relevant may differ substantially. ... It is crucial that we have an understanding of our organization’s mission, vision, objectives and strategy before and during our process design or improvement initiatives. If we don’t, we risk designing a process that is out of kilter with the organization’s aspirations.


5 reasons why Lego-like modular PCs aren't as exciting as they seem

Companies like Acer, which recently announced its Revo modular computer, promise to make PC component upgrades as easy as snapping together a few Lego bricks. The idea is that anyone should be able to customize their own desktop rig without the usual tangle of wires, finicky connectors, and exposed circuit boards. You may recall Razer making similar promises a couple years ago with Project Christine, a modular PC that didn’t get beyond the concept stage. And of course there’s the recently released Micro Lego Computer and its accessories, all of which literally look like Lego blocks. While these announcements always elicit oohs and aahs from the tech press, in reality they just don’t make a lot of sense. Without a concerted, industry-wide effort to make the modular PC a reality, you’d be wise to steer clear of the concept.


How to Make Your Data Center PUE Calculation More Accurate

While PUE has become the de facto metric for measuring infrastructure efficiency, data center managers must clarify three things before embarking on their measurement strategy: There must be agreement on exactly what devices constitute IT loads, what devices constitute physical infrastructure, and what devices should be excluded from the measurement. Since most data center operators who attempt to determine PUE will encounter one or more of the above problems, a standard way to deal with them should be defined. The three-pronged approach outlined below can be used to effectively determine PUE. This methodology defines a standard approach for collecting data and drawing insight from data centers.


Design Thinking

Empathizing is not easy. It should wreck you! It should shake you to the core. And it has done just that to me–to my life. I am so grateful for the people who I have met, who have shared their struggles, because I have learned so much from them. It has strengthened and enlightened me–my entire life–and it started with my own mother. My mother had a heart of gold and would give the very shirt off of her back, but also the shirt off of my back, my brother’s back, and my dad’s back. Though she used to tell us, “We will not give a hand out, but a helping hand.” (I can attest she gave more than a hand!) How I miss so much of that wisdom today. My mother gave her life helping others and building them up to succeed. And, through her example of selflessness and generosity, I have learned how to be a leader, a father, and a friend.


Behind American Express’ Machine Learning Effort

We use machine learning to identify potential fraud concerns whenever an American Express Card is used anywhere in the world. Our machine learning models help to protect $1 trillion in charge volume every year. Making the decision in less than 2 milliseconds, it allows us to approve charges at the point of sale, with the least amount of disruption to our customers. The point-of-sale decisions we make using machine learning in turn automatically trigger fraud alerts to our Card Members through instant emails, text messages and smart phone notifications. Card Members are able to verify charges through these channels very quickly, allowing them to continue with their transaction without further disruption.



Quote for the day:

"You can't let praise or criticism get to you. It's a weakness to get caught up in either one." -- John Wooden

September 13, 2015

The Challenges And Benefits Of Robotics In The Next 5 Years

Much to the disappointment of science fiction writers everywhere—and contrary to the anxieties of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking—Tappeiner insists that robots will not be taking over the world anytime soon. “Definitely not in the next five years,” Tappeiner says. “Probably not in the next 50 years.” ... Even though robotics and automation in military research has helped to animate the spectre of killer robots, Tappeiner argues that robots will continue to serve humans for the near future, largely because current AI techniques still fall far short of the capabilities of the human brain. While machine learning excels at specific tasks like translation (Google Translate, for example, uses a technique called statistical machine translation), that intelligence is not easy to generalise.


Open Rest

One of the features of Spring Data Rest is exporting query methods as RESTful endpoints. That is awesome for simple cases eg. to supply your API with an endpoint to filter users by their username, you just have to write one line of code. Unfortunately those query methods are indivisible and cannot be combined with each other. That implies, that developers solving some complex cases, like queries with optional parameters, have to either write multiple query methods or write a custom method and export it with a controller. ... Second feature, that OpenRest comes with is Data Transfer Objects for POST, PUT and PATCH requests. Since Spring Data Rest is a great piece of code, one of my main principles while writing OpenRest was change as little as possible, and let users to switch it off and use basic features of Spring Data Rest when needed.


Developing Advanced Talent Analytics: Why It Matters to CFOs

Developing a talent analytics program should start with identifying the top business challenges HR needs to address. As CFOs typically have a view across the organization, they can provide a perspective on what the business needs from HR and where to focus efforts. That information will help determine the data HR will need to collect and analyze. For example, if the challenge is to improve the leadership pipeline at the business units, what are the metrics that the business needs to make decisions around leadership? Another foundational element is the quality of the data. If you go in to an advanced analytics project with inconsistent or poor-quality data, the HR group will quickly lose credibility with stakeholders.


How Wearables, Analytics and the IoT Will Redefine the Enterprise of 2020

New technology like wearable computing, mobile apps, the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and data analytics are beginning to influence all aspects of our lives. As a consumer, it can feel like your applications are always a step ahead of you. Use navigation app Waze at a certain time of day, and it knows you are heading from the office to home, pre-populating the route. This pervasive connectivity, and abundance of information about users, places, and things play a pivotal role in creating highly contextual and efficient experiences. In the case of smart apps, the experience begins 30 secondsbefore the user taps it — it knows what the user is looking for before they do.


Why NASA Wants Microsoft’s HoloLens in Space

Norris, who is also the leader of the Ops Lab at JPL, says NASA is also working on other applications for HoloLens, like using augmented reality for inventory management. Apparently keeping track of where things are and how to find them is a big challenge on the space station, even though objects have bar codes on them and are organized with a database. NASA has prototyped an app that can be used to recognize an object and show the HoloLens wearer a path to follow that leads to where the object should be stored, Norris says. In the meantime, to get some sense of what it will be like to use HoloLens on the space station, NASA experimented with HoloLens at the Aquarius underwater research station off the coast of Key Largo, Florida, in late July and early August.


Cyber-security Trouble shooting

Attributing digital attacks is said to be getting easier. But it is necessarily harder than in the real, “kinetic” world. So is deciding on the scale and direction of any retaliation. Arms control is all but impossible: digital weapons have to be secret to be effective. Though officials are cagey about the details, they believe they have detected Chinese and other hackers snooping on (and perhaps interfering in other ways with) computers and networks which run important infrastructure. Efforts to strengthen the systems involved are under way; the creaky power grid is a particular worry. Working out who is ahead is hard. America is doubtless making similar efforts on infrastructure networks in Russia and China—which may be in some ways more vulnerable to attack.


Unleash the power of razor template

To be able to perform true unit testing we need to isolate mvc features from rendering the view, which means no authorization, no model binding, no request validation, no filter actions, no method selectors, and no action invocation. You should only need to specify specify the view content, the view model, view data, temp data, bundles, etc... and a controller context because razor happens to need one to expose UrlHelper and HtmlHelper. So why not use Razor Engine or similar? simply because Razor Engine has a distinct application where MVC features are not needed, ie. Razor Engine does not support the view '~/Views/Home/Index.cshtml' from the default ASP.NET MVC project template, but if you need full support of razor features then we need something else, that is where Xania.AspNet.Simulator comes into play.


Agile Fluency and Let's Code Javascript

With the fluency model, it is not really the case. What you have is four different stops on a journey and any one of those stops can be right for any team, depending on what they need and what their organization needs. Figuring out exactly what fluency your team has, takes some experience. We have distilled down four core metrics – they are not sufficient conditions, but if you do not have these capabilities, then you are probably not fluent. So, for a one star teams, the teams that are focused on value which means talking in terms of business value. So, if you have a team and they are not talking in terms of business value, they are not showing progress in terms of business value, they are not giving their business partners the chance to change direction, change the order of stories, for example,


The Future of VMware? Experts Opine

Whether VMware will remain relevant as IT migrates to the cloud is “a really interesting question,” Miniman said. “First of all, this shift to cloud is a long term thing. We’re talking one of these ten-year swings. Wikibon’s latest research on it is, in ten years, it’s a third of the enterprise spend.” There’s time to adapt. VMware is “doing a great job of trying to make things more efficient, and they listen to their customers,” he said. He pointed to the company’s progress with VSAN and NSX. “However, I worry about VMware ignoring the impact of AWS and Azure." Initiatives like Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry (a well-funded offshoot developed by VMware) are promising, he said. “But I feel like they’re kind of trying to run out the clock on some stuff they’re doing, and not pushing as aggressively in some of the new technologies as fast.


Perceptions of Time in EA Teams

Some enterprises will be predominantly at one extreme or the other. Based on the research, there is a likely expectation that EA teams in Japan, the US, and some Western European countries — such as Switzerland, Ireland, Germany, Italy, England, Sweden, Austria, and the Netherlands — will produce results comparatively quickly. EA teams in other countries with slower-paced cultures, such as most Mediterranean and Arab countries, are more likely to work at a comparatively gentle or slow pace. The key point is that pace is relative — it is likely to be comparatively fast or comparatively slow, but there will always be some EA environments with a mixture of both fast and slow, and some that fluctuate between the two extremes.



Quote for the day:

“Everyone is gifted, but some people never open their package.” -- Wolfgang Riebe

September 12, 2015

Baidu’s Duer Joins the Virtual Assistant Party

Duer’s success will depend on how well it can parse naturally spoken language. This is notoriously difficult, although researchers have been making significant progress in recent years in both speech recognition and, to a lesser degree, natural language processing thanks to a powerful machine-learning technique known as deep learning. Companies such as Facebook see natural language as a key challenge for mining information and communicating with users. According to Baidu, Duer will mine meaning from written information on the Web. Baidu will collect information about a restaurant, for example, and Duer will infer whether it is pet-friendly or has outdoor seating.


Aggressive Android ransomware spreading in the USA

After a successful installation, the malware tries to obtain Device Administrator privileges. This trick is being used by Android malware authors more and more, as it makes it more difficult to remove the infection. Earlier versions of this Android/Locker family do this in just the same way as all other Android Trojans – they rely on the user willingly activating the elevated privileges. In the latest versions, however, the Trojan obtains Device Administrator rights much more covertly. The activation window is overlaid with the Trojan’s malicious window pretending to be an “Update patch installation”. As the victims click through this innocuous-looking installation they also unknowingly activate the Device Administrator privileges in the hidden underlying window.


Think your meeting's important? 25 years ago, this one spawned Wi-Fi

Most important, for anyone today who wants to buy an inexpensive Wi-Fi router and connect almost any portable device to it, NCR decided from the beginning that its WLAN technology should become an industry standard. The group that would develop that standard, called IEEE 802.11, first met 25 years ago Thursday.  ... Out of that initial impulse grew one of the most successful examples of open standards in action. Wi-Fi, which got its name from the industry group that certifies 802.11 products for interoperability, has gone into more than 10 billion devices and is used in home and business networks and public hotspots around the world. Even many mobile operators with their own licensed frequencies rely on Wi-Fi to better serve subscribers.


Peter Thiel Explains Biotech Investing Rationale: Get Rid of Randomness

The question is, can you change those probabilities into different numbers? The reason we invested in Stemcentrx at a valuation that would have been higher than many other biotechs we looked at is that we felt the whole company was designed to get these probabilities as close to one as possible at every step, to get rid of as much of this randomness or contingency as possible. That is something that we found deeply reassuring. One of the very unusual things they do is graft human cancer into the mice. It’s a somewhat more expensive way to do this than studying cancer in cell culture. It’s a somewhat harder structure to build. But drugs tested this way are much more likely to work in humans.


Machine Learning and Its Impact on Cyber-Security

First, the collection and storage of large volumes of data has been steadily adopted as a best practice, particularly in financial services and defense industries. However, a typical challenge faced by these organizations is the approach and tooling required to sort, mine and interpret the insights and patterns from the aggregated data. Secondly, the talent pool to deal with these tasks has been continually on the decline. This leaves opportunities for things to fall through the proverbial crack and cause security incidents to increase. These two points are illustrations of why machine learning can improve the security posture of an organization.


How to Balance the Five Analytic Dimensions

So many data scientists select an analytic technique in hopes of achieving a magical solution, but in the end, the solution simply may not even be possible due to other limiting factors. It is important for organizations working with analytic capabilities to understand the various constraints of implementation most real-world applications will encounter. When developing a solution one has to consider: data complexity, speed, analytic complexity, accuracy & precision, and data size. Data Scientists, nor the organizations they work for, will be able to be the best in each category simultaneously; however, it will prove necessary to understand the trade-offs of each.


OpenText Delivers Big Data Analytics in the OpenText Cloud

OpenText Big Data Analytics is a complete advanced analytics solution, combining advanced analytics software and maintenance with professional and learning services to accelerate big data initiatives. The solution is available as a managed cloud service to offer users complete management within the OpenText cloud. With this new Analytics-as-a-Service offering, the power of big data analytics is now accessible to business users and analysts in marketing, financial, and operational functions, driving a better understanding of customers, markets and operations to deliver more targeted campaigns, create more relevant products and offers and or discover opportunities for performance improvements.


Meeting Developer Demands with WebRTC and CloudRTC Platforms

Developers are quickly adopting WebRTC and cloud communications platforms as vendors bringing to market new offerings with a variety of tools and features. The primary focus of cloud communications platforms is to enable developers to integrate communication capabilities such as voice, messaging, and video chat into their applications using REST APIs and SDK’s. By providing access to communications services through the use of simple web based technologies, cloud communications platforms are abstracting away the complexity of telecommunications infrastructure and making communications much more flexible and extensible. These platforms provide a much larger and more creative population of developer’s access to interconnectivity technology, setting the foundation for an ecosystem that will redefine how we think about communications.


Do Containers Change Enterprise IT?

A highly distributed cloud-native application has built into it business continuity capability, as such applications are designed to be resilient within themselves. If one part dies, another piece takes over automatically. Where these components live is not much of an issue. However, the data created and used by the containers needs to be stored not in each container, but within some centralized and distributed database to ensure the data is available at all times to all components. The containers themselves become stateless, yet the application may be stateful within various layers of the application. For that, we need to store data somewhere outside the container.


How Data Center Providers Have Become Cloud Leaders

The cloud obviously lives in the data center. In today’s ever-changing IT environment, more emphasis is being placed on the data center. In fact, almost all new technologies being deployed today require a place to reside. This location is the data center. It’s no wonder that the modern data center is being referred to as the data center of everything. In using advanced data center technologies your organizations would literally have a secure slice of the cloud to manage and control. Although the workload is considered to be cloud-based, there is still a very real physical point to all of that information. In creating a data center platform ready for the cloud, administrators must take a few important details into consideration.



Quote for the day:

"Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking." -- Malcolm

September 11, 2015

iPad Pro’s potential as a laptop replacement excites CIOs

Rohinee Mohindroo, CIO of Rakuten Marketing, says that the combination of the iPad Pro's size, smart keyboard and stylus make it an attractive package that could potentially replace laptops and desktops at the digital marketing company, many of whose 800 employees use iPads to show clients presentations. "What's exciting about the iPad Pro is the possibility of replacing desktops because of the usability factor," Mohindroo says. "The Pencil and the keyboard definitely make the usability a lot more appealing and I think we'll have a lot more people interested in moving to the iPad Pro."


People in CIO positions should stay off this list

A CIO also won't be trusted, Cameron explained in the report, if the IT department doesn't build systems that are "end-to-end" -- integrated into all the other applications a business uses on a daily basis. At Home Depot, Cameron told me, a checkout clerk can ring you up, of course, but he can also let you know about a sale the store is having that day or check on the availability of another item you might need. "All of a sudden it's not a point-of-sale transaction," he said. "I'm now invoking marketing systems, bundling systems, inventory systems, shipping."Integrating these systems and making the data available to that checkout person is how IT organizations help their companies compete for today's customers.


What to Do To Create a Continual Improvement Culture

In many organization CEOs are not aware of what is going on. This is a weakness that must be addressed systemically. Many of the better management methods proposed by W. Edwards Deming address this issue. CEOs are given a false picture when they focus on results instead of the management system. CEOs are given a false picture when they crate a climate of fear. CEOs are given a false picture in organizations focused on achieving bonuses instead of continual improvement. These weaknesses in CEOs effectiveness cascade down the organization with each level experiencing their own versions of these weaknesses. In order to create the right culture requires a management system that is built to support the organization in growing into such a culture.


What will the Internet of Things mean for project management?

If it’s connected to a computer, then it’s still part of that computer and not considered part of the IoT. That will change in the next 6 months, right? Be ready. Will smart watches ever become a viable part of project engagements? Probably. More IoT considerations. The IoT can include heart monitoring implants, animal chips, onboard car sensors, and various field operational devices used by workers in both the private and public sectors – including policemen, firemen, etc. So, could those include something like a handheld device that scans bar codes without a computer and transits data in real-time? Yes, most definitely. These things, while not prominent today, could be requested and included in tomorrow’s IT organization and project customer base.


Salaries by Roles in Data Science and Business Intelligence

Data Scientist is the hottest role. What's next? We present national average salaries, job title progression in career, job trends and skills for popular job titles in Data Science & Business Intelligence. Check out the salaries of related roles ... Methodology: For the popular job titles as queries, the Glassdoor API will return the jobs in USA that a person in that job would typically go on to take - based on a frequency percentage. We condensed this data by filtering the top titles first based on frequency, and then by highest increase in median pay.  Indeed.com searches millions of jobs listed across thousands of websites. The job trends graphs below show the percentage of jobs Indeed finds that contain the given job title as a search term.


How the Internet of Things will revolutionise medicine

Over the next five years the traditional 'doctor-patient' model will completely open up as self-monitoring devices do away with the need for routine check-ups and appointments, and IoT sensors in our homes and on our bodies increasingly allow us to look after ourselves. "The opportunities for connected devices to revolutionise healthcare are vast, and many go beyond individual doctor to patient relationships," says Nick Braund of the Technology & Innovation team at tech agency PHA Media. Its 'bionic doctor' project picked out gadgets including the Dario smart glucose meter, the Tricella Liif Pillbox, the Pancreum Genesiswearable pancreas and the Lechal vibrating navigational shoes for the blind as IoT products at the forefront of a new era of digital health.


Flap over Zappos holacracy puts spotlight on 'bossless' workplace

There are lots of names coming about: Holacracy is one. I call it wiki management. Steve Denning calls it radical management. It's known in the software development world as Agile management. They are all forms of peer-to-peer networks. Some of them have supervisors, and some of them don't. So, it isn't necessary that they eliminate supervisors, but it is necessary that the supervisors don't have the sovereign authority that they do in top-down hierarchies. In these organizations, everyone gets to evaluate everyone else in a way that affects compensation in some way, shape or form. So, there is what I call a wider band of accountability, which is what I think makes them so highly effective. In a top-down hierarchy, evaluations go one way: The boss evaluates the subordinate. The subordinate rarely gets to evaluate the boss in a way that affects their compensation.


Taking care of business: Why IT needs to change its ways

As a way of preventing the possible consequences of IT not being run like a business, industry leaders have recently formed a consortium to look at how to better run the business of IT. With billions of dollars invested in IT each year, consortium members realised their investments must be made prudently with tangible results in order to succeed. The result of their efforts is The Open Group IT4IT Forum, which released a Snapshot of its proposed Reference Architecture for running IT more like a business in November 2014. The Reference Architecture is meant to serve as an operating model for IT, providing the “missing link” that previous IT-function specific models have failed to address. The model allows IT to achieve the same level of business, discipline, predictability and efficiency as other business functions.


The real problem with artificial intelligence

AI is basically smart software that enables machines to mimic human behavior. For many people, it is already a part of daily life. Apple's Siri, Google Now, and Skype's Real-Time Translation tool are all examples of artificial intelligence.  Some AI systems incorporate many different components like computer vision, speech recognition, tactile feedback and touch systems. All of these sensory modalities give computers the ability to sense as well as, or even better than humans. The collected data can then be used to plan or take action.  ... But when people like Musk or Hawking warn about AI, they are cautioning against giving AI systems complete autonomy — which isn’t something that happens naturally, Dietterich said.


The Power of Search to Analyze Business Data

Despite promises that self-service BI would deliver on this desire, typical business users, such as marketers and sales managers, can still do little with the current crop of tools unless they go through costly and time-consuming training. As a result, very few organizations are realizing the full potential from their BI investments. The solution to providing every business user with full access to up-to-date information from every corner of the enterprise lies in search technology. While this idea has been floated in the past, recent advances, including increased computing performance and scale out architectures, have now made powerful search-driven analytics products feasible.



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"Leaders who won't own failures become failures." -- Orrin Woodward