June 25, 2013

Data center outage takes French state financial system offline for four days
"We can confirm that last Wednesday there was an incident affecting one of the rooms in one of our data centers," said Bull media relations manager Aurelie Negro via email. "By putting the necessary emergency plan into action, we were able to resume normal operating conditions within an hour. However, the degraded operating conditions during that hour may have had an impact on some of our customers," she wrote.


Five Great .NET Framework 4.5 Features
The problem with most of the recent Microsoft releases have been communication with .NET developers. Only one or two features are known to developers and other features just stay on MSDN and end up becoming simple documents ... Shivprasad Koirala picks his favorite five features keeping in mind the larger .NET community.


Jon Oringer of Shutterstock, on the Power of the Hackathon
"You want people who will push the thinking but not cause trouble. It’s hard to explain, but it’s a feeling you get. It’s easy to find people who will be disruptive thinkers who are reckless, but it’s hard to find disruptive thinkers who are productive. We try every day to make each dollar we spend go one penny further than it did yesterday. "


Managers, meet with your employees to show you mean business
You can ask about motivations and aspirations at annual performance appraisal time or during midyear reviews, but this approach has its limitations. For some employees a performance assessment is nerve-wracking even if they are good performers. Under these circumstances, they may not be as clear and open about their goals as you would like.


SQL Server Functions to handle date time conversion and formats.
When talking about date and time, different languages uses different standards (format) and the developer needs to take care about the date and or time format as per the geographic locations (or languages). This article will go through all the SQL Server Functions that helps to convert date and time values to and from string literals and other date and time formats.


The New Generation of Database Technology Includes Semantics and Search
“In theory there’s no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.” The reality is that the organizational environment is too dynamic and the schema design, data cleansing and ETL tasks required to make the enterprise data warehouse work are too complex and take too long for this approach to succeed. Organizations are starting to look at a more federated approach, combining metadata from various data silos so that they can query across these silos.


11 Ways to Make Healthcare IT Easier
Technology isn't the only challenge of meaningful use stage 2. The cultural change that comes with using technology to advance clinical processes hits some physicians hard. Two years implementing CPOE, only 55 percent of physicians at New Jersey'sCentraState Healthcare System were using it, says Neal Ganguly, vice president and CIO, admitting that there's no penalty in place for noncompliance.


So What If Chief Marketing Officers Outspend CIOs On Enterprise Tech?
CIOs might recoil in horror at the thought of commercially fueled CMOs taking over a key aspect of their domain. Buying software - wait for it - simply because it threatened to get the job done - will likely ruffle some feathers. Software companies, too, might not adapt well to the challenge of selling to an entirely different audience with significantly different motivations.


SDNs, the Hype Cycle and the Future of Network Management
SDNs will succeed because they offer real value. The payoff is speed to market, according to Bethany Mayer, the senior vice president and general manager of HP Networking. During an interview at HP Discover 2013, Mayer said that SDNs enable changes to be made in a far shorter timeframe than in an environment in which every network element must be manually adjusted.


The Most Effective Ways to Make It Right When You Screw Up
Apologies are tricky. Done right, they can resolve conflict, repair hurt feelings, foster forgiveness, and improve relationships. An apology can even keep you out of the courtroom. Despite the fact that lawyers often caution their clients to avoid apologies, fearing that they are tantamount to an admission of guilt, studies show that when potential plaintiffs receive an apology, they are more likely to settle out of court for less money.



Quote for the day:

"Two elements of successful leadership: a willingness to be wrong and an eagerness to admit it." -- Seth Godin


June 24, 2013

Committee throws data retention decision back to government
If ISPs are required to keep the data, it should be mandatory that the data is encrypted, and the data should not be kept for more than two years. The government should shoulder the costs for providers to keep this service, the committee said. Should the government go ahead with the scheme, there should also be an oversight committee and annual reports on the scheme submitted to parliament, the committee has recommended.


Dresner’s Point: Put Your Business Intelligence Results Under the Microscope
The discipline of creating and agreeing on the metrics and aligning them to goals is probably 80 percent of the work. But that discipline leads to great value. It’s hard work and often complicated in a corporate culture. But it’s the committed who succeed at BI, and the rewards in competitive advantages can be huge.


Reference Architecture - Auto-scaling Moodle deployment on AWS
Moodle deployments on AWS can be configured to automatically scale up and down seamlessly to meet the highs and lows in the demand curve in the most optimum and cost-effective manner. This post presents reference architecture for deploying Moodle Learning Management System over AWS Cloud to achieve high levels of Performance, Scalability, Availability, Security and Reliability.


Disruptions: Medicine That Monitors You
“You will — voluntarily, I might add — take a pill, which you think of as a pill but is in fact a microscopic robot, which will monitor your systems” and wirelessly transmit what is happening, Eric E. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, said last fall at a company conference. “If it makes the difference between health and death, you’re going to want this thing.”


Cyber-retaliation: How security is becoming a priority for the Middle East
The amount of money spent on IT security is growing at 15 percent a year, IDC said, and in some cases, companies are spending big to protect their networks. Last year, MEED reported that the major national oil companies in the Middle East spend around $10m annually to secure their systems. Security is high on the minds of IT professionals in the region and attitudes are hardening.


Microsoft services agreement changes: What other enterprises can learn
Google got into trouble with recent changes to its policies regarding the handling of user information, and now Microsoft seems to have caused some concern with similar changes. Should enterprises be concerned with Microsoft's new user information policies? Are there any lessons to be learned for enterprises on how to state exactly what data they collect?


Wearable Computing Will Turn The Concept Of Big Data On Its Head
Consider the impact of health professionals wearing Google Glass to document illnesses just by looking at a patient. The benefits for the individual patient could be significant, life-saving even. But the societal benefit of this collective knowledge could be life-changing. Yet it would only be made possible through gathering data in the first place.


Microsoft wants to patent gestures inside cars … no, not that kind
A newly surfaced patent application from three Microsoft researchers outlines a system for interacting with a vehicle’s information and entertainment system using a variety of gestures, such as a finger to the lips for turning down the audio volume, a thumbs-up to approve an action, or a pinch of the chin — a “quizzical pose,” as the filing puts it — to conduct an Internet search. Another example: The user “can make a movement that mimics placing a phone near an ear” to instruct the mobile device to place a call.


Microsoft Expected To Offer Oracle 12c On Azure Cloud
“Next week, we will be announcing technology partnerships with the most important SaaS companies and infrastructure companies in the cloud,” Ellison promised last week. “And they will be committing to our technology for years to come.” Ellison said 12c would be the ”foundation of a modern cloud” and, since Salesforce and Netsuite already use Oracle databases, adding the new 12c version is not a big stretch for them. It merely adds technology more suited to the multi-tenant cloud model where they operate.


IT Hiccups of the Week: Southwest Airlines Computer Failure Grounded All Flights
The computer failure, a Southwest spokesperson told the AP, “impaired the airline's ability to do such things as conduct check-ins, print boarding passes and monitor the weight of each aircraft.” Planes on the taxiways were recalled to the terminals although planes in flight were unaffected. The airline was able to get its back-up system operational, although the system's performance was said to be “sluggish.”



Quote for the day:

"Being present means being present with your heart and your mind, listening intentionally, without an agenda, judgment or expectations." -- Tweet by @ReinaBach

June 23, 2013

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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



Quote for the day:

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

June 22, 2013

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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



Quote for the day:

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

June 21, 2013

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


Expectations of Risk Management Outpacing Capabilities – It’s Time For Action
This is the main finding of a large-scale study of risk conducted by KPMG International, based on a global survey of 1,092 C-level respondents that was deployed by the Economist Intelligence Unit in December 2012. The aim was to find out about executives' perceptions of the risks facing their companies and their sense of how, and how well, their companies and industries are tackling them.



Quote for the day:

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