Investing in the Internet of Things
When objects can represent themselves digitally, they become greater than the object itself. They don’t just relate to you, but to surrounding objects and a database as well. Objects’ acting in unison is known as “Ambient Intelligence.” On the Internet of Things, devices large and small will be imbued with processing power and connected to one another, allowing them to share data and in some circumstances, control one another. Everything will be online, everything is monitored and everything is connected: our homes, our appliances, our financial systems, our government. Cars won’t need drivers, planes won’t need pilots wars won’t need soldiers.
The hottest gadgets of 1985
For the millennial generation it may be hard to imagine what life would be like without ubiquitous internet, smartphones, digital music and social media. But for those of us Gen-Xers that grew up in the 1980s, here's the pinnacle of tech that continues to inspire us, even 30 years later. In 1985, cell phones were so new to the market and so large that they weren't even portable per se -- they had to be installed in your car. Here's the two coolest dudes on TV at the time -- Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas in the first season of Miami Vice sporting a car phone in their Ferrari Daytona.
Review: The Intel Compute Stick -- the ultimate mobile PC
It operates using 802.11n Wi-Fi (note that the Stick operates only in the 2.4GHz band). It also uses Bluetooth 4.0, so you can connect peripherals such as a keyboard and mouse. The system is based on Intel's quad-core Atom Z3735F processor, which has been used mostly for tablets, has 2MB of processor cache and a base speed of 1.3GHz; using Intel's TurboBoost, it can go as fast as 1.8GHz. ... the Stick provided enough processing power for working with mainstream applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint as well as online programs like Gmail and Skype. It was reasonably fast for surfing, and worked like a charm for watching video using Netflix, MLB.tv and YouTube.
Five Simple Steps to Enact Data Governance
Usage starts where data first enters the organization—at the source. Some data are entered via various transactional or point-of-sales systems. Others data are acquired where they are merged, cleansed, transformed and consolidated downstream. Eventually all data points get aggregated in a warehouse and subsequently queried or get “data-marted” for specific analysis. This analysis supports various decisions throughout the organization – operational, tactical and strategic. The quality of the data defines what will happen downstream as data travel across and within the organization. As important decisions depend on data being usable, it is important that data elements are managed to their best quality. How do we ensure this? Here are 5 simple steps.
Windows 10 Technical Preview Build 10061 now available
This build will be available to the Fast ring, and will be delivered via Windows Update. You can wait for your PCs normal installation time for Windows Updates and it will install automatically, or you can go to Settings > Update & security > Windows Updates and click the “Check for updates” button. If you’re in the Slow ring, we made the decision not to push 10049 out to you because of the bug with long upgrade times caused by installing all Language Packs. We’ll evaluate how 10061 goes in the Fast ring before deciding whether to push it out to Slow as well. The Language Pack issue is a good example of our approach to the Fast/Slow rings for the Windows Insider Program, and why we have two rings.
Mobile guilt trips lead to distracted workers. Time to unplug?
Gordon says it's the CIO's job to help maintain work-life balance for employees. It's somewhat ironic, because the CIO was probably one of the primary enablers of work-life imbalance by building an always-on system that pushes the boundaries of mobile worker productivity. On the managerial side, a CIO can make the case that the blended work-life culture leads to higher quantity but lower quality of work. On the technical side, a CIO can adopt email features such as the solution in place at Huffington Post or create a true "do not disturb" state for mobile devices. It's important to address this problem before feelings of guilt and stress get out of hand, Gordon says.
Honda proposes grid of accident-resistant, clean energy cars that go 180 mph
First of all, it's more of a vision and a discussion-starter than a fully conceived plan like Musk's Hyperloop. It will require a lot of different players with big egos to get on board and build consensus in order to make it work. It will depend on a U.S. government that has underfunded its highway infrastructure to change course and make a major investment. Paluch sat down with ZDNet in a HondaJet, the new light business aircraft it debuted at SAE, to talk more about its vision for a hyper fast highway system. "[Governments] want to build something. So why not give them a dream of something to build?" said Paluch. "But we as an industry haven't come up with an actual consolidated vision for what that future looks like. We have to create that vision."
3 Tips for Effective Stand-Up Meetings
Stand-Up meetings are a popular way to start the day for many product development teams. Usually they take around 15 minutes and are held standing up (surprise!). The idea is to keep the meeting short and to the point. With that in mind everybody goes through a routine of questions: What did I accomplish yesterday?; What will I do today?; and What obstacles are impeding my progress? Less emails, less unfocused hour-long meetings, less interruptions, more flow time. As added bonus they are also great for onboarding new team members. Let’s look into how introducing just three simple concepts helped us to make the Stand-Up work way better for us.
Randy Shoup and Andrew Phillips Answer Questions on Microservices
Shoup sees Microservices, Continuous Delivery, Agile practices, and DevOps as complementary approaches for delivering great software. When implementing microservices, “individual changes are bounded and easily understood, so it is easier to adopt a process of continuous integration or continuous delivery,” breaking down a larger feature into “many small steps, each of which can be understood, implemented, tested, and deployed individually.” Phillips considers that people are seeing some features as “big” because of the overhead needed to push them into production: “if it takes 25 people in a conference room a whole weekend to deploy something to production, you will not do it simply to change one line of code.”
Enterprise Architecture Celebrating its 40th Anniversary in 2015
It was 1975 when Wurman gave us the label “architecture”. We’ve come a long way in these forty years, and sometimes we forget about the vast range of techniques that form the core discipline of EA. I thought it would be useful therefore to give a brief history of EA as a reminder of the origins of some of these techniques. The 1970s was a fertile time for methodologies and approaches aimed at the development of applications and data. Information Engineering (IE) emerged in the late 1970s based on the original work of Clive Finkelstein and James Martin. IE is a business-driven methodology that provides an architectural approach to planning, analyzing, designing, and implementing applications.
Quote for the day:
"Surround yourself with great people; delegate authority; get out of the way" -- Ronald Reagan
When objects can represent themselves digitally, they become greater than the object itself. They don’t just relate to you, but to surrounding objects and a database as well. Objects’ acting in unison is known as “Ambient Intelligence.” On the Internet of Things, devices large and small will be imbued with processing power and connected to one another, allowing them to share data and in some circumstances, control one another. Everything will be online, everything is monitored and everything is connected: our homes, our appliances, our financial systems, our government. Cars won’t need drivers, planes won’t need pilots wars won’t need soldiers.
The hottest gadgets of 1985
For the millennial generation it may be hard to imagine what life would be like without ubiquitous internet, smartphones, digital music and social media. But for those of us Gen-Xers that grew up in the 1980s, here's the pinnacle of tech that continues to inspire us, even 30 years later. In 1985, cell phones were so new to the market and so large that they weren't even portable per se -- they had to be installed in your car. Here's the two coolest dudes on TV at the time -- Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas in the first season of Miami Vice sporting a car phone in their Ferrari Daytona.
Review: The Intel Compute Stick -- the ultimate mobile PC
It operates using 802.11n Wi-Fi (note that the Stick operates only in the 2.4GHz band). It also uses Bluetooth 4.0, so you can connect peripherals such as a keyboard and mouse. The system is based on Intel's quad-core Atom Z3735F processor, which has been used mostly for tablets, has 2MB of processor cache and a base speed of 1.3GHz; using Intel's TurboBoost, it can go as fast as 1.8GHz. ... the Stick provided enough processing power for working with mainstream applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint as well as online programs like Gmail and Skype. It was reasonably fast for surfing, and worked like a charm for watching video using Netflix, MLB.tv and YouTube.
Five Simple Steps to Enact Data Governance
Usage starts where data first enters the organization—at the source. Some data are entered via various transactional or point-of-sales systems. Others data are acquired where they are merged, cleansed, transformed and consolidated downstream. Eventually all data points get aggregated in a warehouse and subsequently queried or get “data-marted” for specific analysis. This analysis supports various decisions throughout the organization – operational, tactical and strategic. The quality of the data defines what will happen downstream as data travel across and within the organization. As important decisions depend on data being usable, it is important that data elements are managed to their best quality. How do we ensure this? Here are 5 simple steps.
Windows 10 Technical Preview Build 10061 now available
This build will be available to the Fast ring, and will be delivered via Windows Update. You can wait for your PCs normal installation time for Windows Updates and it will install automatically, or you can go to Settings > Update & security > Windows Updates and click the “Check for updates” button. If you’re in the Slow ring, we made the decision not to push 10049 out to you because of the bug with long upgrade times caused by installing all Language Packs. We’ll evaluate how 10061 goes in the Fast ring before deciding whether to push it out to Slow as well. The Language Pack issue is a good example of our approach to the Fast/Slow rings for the Windows Insider Program, and why we have two rings.
Mobile guilt trips lead to distracted workers. Time to unplug?
Gordon says it's the CIO's job to help maintain work-life balance for employees. It's somewhat ironic, because the CIO was probably one of the primary enablers of work-life imbalance by building an always-on system that pushes the boundaries of mobile worker productivity. On the managerial side, a CIO can make the case that the blended work-life culture leads to higher quantity but lower quality of work. On the technical side, a CIO can adopt email features such as the solution in place at Huffington Post or create a true "do not disturb" state for mobile devices. It's important to address this problem before feelings of guilt and stress get out of hand, Gordon says.
Honda proposes grid of accident-resistant, clean energy cars that go 180 mph
First of all, it's more of a vision and a discussion-starter than a fully conceived plan like Musk's Hyperloop. It will require a lot of different players with big egos to get on board and build consensus in order to make it work. It will depend on a U.S. government that has underfunded its highway infrastructure to change course and make a major investment. Paluch sat down with ZDNet in a HondaJet, the new light business aircraft it debuted at SAE, to talk more about its vision for a hyper fast highway system. "[Governments] want to build something. So why not give them a dream of something to build?" said Paluch. "But we as an industry haven't come up with an actual consolidated vision for what that future looks like. We have to create that vision."
3 Tips for Effective Stand-Up Meetings
Stand-Up meetings are a popular way to start the day for many product development teams. Usually they take around 15 minutes and are held standing up (surprise!). The idea is to keep the meeting short and to the point. With that in mind everybody goes through a routine of questions: What did I accomplish yesterday?; What will I do today?; and What obstacles are impeding my progress? Less emails, less unfocused hour-long meetings, less interruptions, more flow time. As added bonus they are also great for onboarding new team members. Let’s look into how introducing just three simple concepts helped us to make the Stand-Up work way better for us.
Randy Shoup and Andrew Phillips Answer Questions on Microservices
Shoup sees Microservices, Continuous Delivery, Agile practices, and DevOps as complementary approaches for delivering great software. When implementing microservices, “individual changes are bounded and easily understood, so it is easier to adopt a process of continuous integration or continuous delivery,” breaking down a larger feature into “many small steps, each of which can be understood, implemented, tested, and deployed individually.” Phillips considers that people are seeing some features as “big” because of the overhead needed to push them into production: “if it takes 25 people in a conference room a whole weekend to deploy something to production, you will not do it simply to change one line of code.”
Enterprise Architecture Celebrating its 40th Anniversary in 2015
It was 1975 when Wurman gave us the label “architecture”. We’ve come a long way in these forty years, and sometimes we forget about the vast range of techniques that form the core discipline of EA. I thought it would be useful therefore to give a brief history of EA as a reminder of the origins of some of these techniques. The 1970s was a fertile time for methodologies and approaches aimed at the development of applications and data. Information Engineering (IE) emerged in the late 1970s based on the original work of Clive Finkelstein and James Martin. IE is a business-driven methodology that provides an architectural approach to planning, analyzing, designing, and implementing applications.
Quote for the day:
