November 05, 2012

India, Germany to up IT cooperation
India and Germany are mulling plans to form a working group to increase bilateral cooperation in the IT sector, amid increasing trade between them. The group will look at areas such as e-learning and e-medicine among other things, said German vice chancellor Philip Rosler, who met Indian IT Minister Kapil Sibal, according to a report by Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) Sunday.


Introduction to MDX for PowerPivot Users, Part 4: Filtering
The combination of the filtering functionality built into PivotTables, and the ability to delete and reorder tuples in a set without needing to edit the set expression itself that the Excel named set functionality gives you, means that you can usually implement the filters you need in PowerPivot without needing to resort to MDX.


Facebook's Lessons in Leadership
In Facebook's early days, Mark Zuckerberg was a terrible CEO. He didn't communicate well, kept things to himself, and often riled his employees. He also had a bit of an attitude. One famous example was his business card, which stated at the top: "I'm the CEO, Bitch."


On starting a new EA group
But they seldom come that with an EA reference model which is in fact the prime task of an EA without which no one should call himself an EA architect. Without the EA any solution review is subjective and road-mapping and strategy are patchy. Without EA in fact, this work is performed as it was before the advent of EA.


Two consumer analytics platforms launch in Singapore
Rajesh Balan, director of LiveLabs Urban Lifestyle Innovation Platform at SMU, said the platform will enable organizations to utilize real-time insights, helping their campaigns go to market and assess the outcome faster. On the consumer end, it will turn what most users perceive as intrusive spam messages on their phones into something useful.


Understanding and Implementing State Pattern in C#
This article describes what is state pattern, when could we find state pattern useful and how to have a rudimentary implementation of state pattern in C#.


Predictive Analytics Model: A Spotlight Q&A with Simon Arkell of Predixion
s it relates to predictive analytics, we looked at the incumbent vendors – companies like SAS and SPSS, which is now a part of IBM. These are the technologies that have been around for quite a long time. What's broken about the model is that these are products that need highly trained experts, specifically in data science and, in many cases, people with PhDs.


Best practices for software license management

Organizations spend a fortune on licenses every year, and a lack of management around it can result in heavy fines. In some cases, CIOs of certain organizations have been taken into custody for violating norms.


RBS Group shells out further £50m over IT disaster
The banking group's 'technology incident' back in June has now cost a total of £175m, much of which has taken the form of compensation payments to affected customers of NatWest, RBS and Ulster Bank.

---

Quote for the day:

"Remember that it is far better to follow well than to lead indifferently." -- John G. Vance

---

November 04, 2012

Choosing Who NOT to Help
Leaders can’t help those going in the “wrong” direction. By wrong, I don’t mean morally wrong. I mean wrong for the organization. Get out of boats going in the “wrong” direction or you’ll dilute your leadership and the effectiveness of your organization.

Security Researcher Shares Blow-by-Blow Account of Advanced Persistent Threat
Hackers are brazenly infiltrating corporate networks to steal valuable data for purposes of sharing it with other companies or nation-states -- and they're getting away with it, say security researchers sharing war stories at the Hacker Halted conference in Miami this week.

How to make Windows 8 look like Windows 7
When Windows 8 first loads, you'll notice how it defaults to the new Start screen. If you'd rather go straight to the traditional desktop we all know and love, download a free tool called Skip Metro Suite. Once installed, launch the program and verify 'Skip Start Screen' is ticked.

Wyndham Exchange & Rentals has forecasting fever after profits roll in
on the business side they’re identifying risks, for example when revenue targets are exceeding demand forecasts, and sharing that information into the business units and finance teams. The technical forecasting team is a well-oiled machine, building revenue management forecasts to be more highly automated and run much more frequently.


ZeroMQ via C#: Introduction
The main part of ZeroMQ is the socket. It's not the traditional socket, but it's a socket that provides a layer of abstraction on top of the traditional socket API, which frees us from the complexity and the repeated tasks that we do in our applications.


5 trends that are changing how we do big data

In just a few years, big data has turned from a buzzword and concept best left for large web companies into a force that drives much of our digital lives. Here are five technological trends that will change how data is processed and consumed going forward.

Top 5 wireless routers: Home networking evolved
It was clear from CES that 2012 is going to be a year of major changes in home networking, considering the availability of the new 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard. While it's rather complicated to figure out all the differences between Wi-Fi standards, it's quite easy to equip yourself with the best as long as you follow this regularly updated list of the Top 5 networking products currently available.


Internet Governance Forum in Azerbaijan To Discuss Global Policy
Unlike many U.N. forums, IGF is attended not just by government officials but also by corporations, non-profit groups (aka “NGOs” or “non-governmental organizations) and scholars interested in how to handle, security, stability, growth and content management on the global Internet.

Nokia Lumia 920 camera vs. HTC Windows Phone 8X vs. iPhone 5
Pore through these photos to be your own judge. In most cases, you can click to enlarge them. Unless stated, all photos have been cropped or resized, but are otherwise untouched, and I took all photos using automatic settings and modes

Creating Success Through Serendipity
In short, serendipity involves an element of luck that is out of our control but you also have to have the wisdom to spot the opportunity and act. Without the latter, the opportunity would be lost.

---

Quotes for the day:

"There’s always an opportunity to make a difference." – Michael Dell
"Winning is important to me, but what brings me real joy is the experience of being fully engaged in whatever I'm doing" -- Phil Jackson

---

November 03, 2012

Hitting back at cyberattackers: Experts discuss pros and cons
The questions are being asked more often: When a cyberattack hits your network, is it right to launch a counter-attack of some type to try to at least identify the source if not stop it? Since the wheels of justice do indeed grind slowly, should frustrated IT professionals with security skills take matters into their own hands or hire others to do so?


Try the solid, configurable firewall distribution Sphirewall
Out of the box, you get advanced information for your network and traffic usage as well as the ability to glance at network traffic according to user, address, device, and much more. Unlike most Linux-based firewalls, Sphirewall doesn’t use iptables — it uses a kernel module that hooks into the packet stream and passes the packets to the Sphirewall core, which tracks and manages the packets based on user-configurable rules and events.


The Power of Persistence for Leaders
In the world of business leadership and entrepreneurship, persistence is often touted as one of the key success attributes. In a 2011 study conducted by professors at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, persistence was found to be one of the strict criteria for successful CEOs.


jQuery Modal Dialog with Dynamic Content
Here is a demonstration of how to implement a jQuery dialog window (modal or normal) that can contain truly dynamic content, in which the contents are loaded from a totally different aspx/html page.


Back to Basics: Ensuring Strong BI Software Selection
Key differentiators that used to exist between vendor capabilities are becoming harder and harder to decipher, with branding and market penetration becoming a key factor in many software evaluations. Now, in software selection, time to value and scalability are becoming more important success factors than simply providing common features and functions out of the box.


Firefox to force secure connections for selected domains
To force secure connections between the browser and a server, Mozilla uses HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security), a mechanism used by servers to indicate that the connecting browser must use a secure connection, wroteMozilla's David Keeler in a blog post.


The Most Urgent Security Risks in 2012
The state of IT security is constantly shifting. Keeping up-to-date with the latest trends and practices is vital to protecting your organization. Faronics unveils the latest results of the State of IT Security Study conducted by the Ponemon Institute – a leading research authority on data security.


The Amazon Outage in Perspective: Failure Is Inevitable, So Manage Risk
The most recent Amazon Web Services outage left customers (and rival cloud providers) blaming Amazon. Instead, CIO.com columnist Bernard Golden says, everyone needs to accept that cloud computing is not immune to failure.


Google Wallet Gets Real
The Google Wallet Card is intended for circumstances when customers cannot use their software-based, mobile phone-bound Google Wallet, due to a merchant's lack of support for NFC payments.


Now, it's BYOA (bring your own application)
That's the prediction of Edwin Schouten, who points out that along with doing a lot of their work on their own smartphones, tablets or laptops, employees also will soon be selecting the application they are most comfortable with. "This is the whole 'app' culture nowadays," he points out. "Although everyone has a preference, which app you use does not matter, as long as it gets the job done."

---

Quotes for the day:

"Vision is a picture of the future that produces passion." -- Bill Hybels

"When your values are clear to you, making decisions becomes easier." -- Roy E. Disney

---

November 02, 2012

Windows 8 uptake remains listless after public launch
The poor-thus-far showing of Windows 8 doesn't preclude it from eventually thriving, of course. Microsoft is reportedly ready to spend between $1 billion and $1.5 billion on advertising the new operating system, its Windows RT spin-off, and the also-new Windows Phone 8.


Intel researchers work on new way to display, share images
Vara demonstrated the project, dubbed Display without Borders, with a laptop, a Microsoft Connect sensor and a projector. Intel didn't give a timeframe for when the technology might go to market..


TDWI Checklist Report // Using Location Information for Geospatial Analytics
In this TDWI Checklist Report, we review the alignment of geospatial information with the business intelligence environment and provide suggestions for capturing location information and differentiating between deliverable addresses and geolocations.


arrayDB, a New and Easy PHP ORM
arrayDB ORM library has only 5 classes. You mostly use a singleton of one, while others are used internally, that's all. Caching and keeping cache synchronized with the database is all automated, you don't need to keep track of these.


The difference between a weakness and a fatal flaw
Having this significant weakness most often counters or negates the positive impact of profound strengths. In every case we have examined, fatal flaws appear to pull down the effectiveness of a leader. These cases are not rare or unusual. Statistically, we find that 28% of the population of leaders has one or more competencies at the 10th percentile or lower.


An enterprise-wide vision for social business: SAP's new take
Earlier today software giant SAP unveiled their latest vision for enterprise social software, along with an integrated set of functional offerings that focus on delivering targeted business value. Is it enough?


The Digital Capabilities Your Company Needs
In-depth interviews with 157 executives in 50 large companies found that the most fundamental technology requirement for digital transformation is not particular skills or particular technologies. It is a core set of four digital capabilities. These four capabilities revolve around technology but typically not all of them reside in the IT department.


Leadership Perspectives: What Is Your Intention?
There are so many avenues we could take in this conversation, and The Lead Change Group has done that in their new book, The Character Based Leader: Instigating a Leadership Revolution….One Person at a Time, written by 21 authors who believe deeply in this concept of character based leadership.


The software creation literacy crisis
Amid the great wall of noise the digital world is today stands a stark reality: fewer and fewer people have the ability to read and write the basic code building blocks of the internet and mobile world. Ismael Ghalimi of STOIC provocatively writes


Eventually, 90% of tech budgets will be outside IT departments
So CIOs will be relegated to the backoffice, back-room server stuff, while the CDO gets all the fun, get-the-attention-of-management stuff, such as cloud, social, mobile and Big Data?  Gartner says there is a highly visible role for CIOs as well: "CEOs want their CIOs to make their impact felt where the enterprise meets the outside world.

---

Quote for the day:

"A competent leader can get efficient service from poor troops, while an incapable leader can demoralize the best of troops." -- John Pershing

---

November 01, 2012

Cloud adoption in India rising
The bigger growth is happening in private clouds - enterprises using the cloud concept internally - rather than in public clouds, where companies use third-party shared data centres to access computing resources. The Zinnov study estimated that 70-75% of the $4.5 billion cloud market in 2015 would come from private cloud deployments.


EMC to Buy Web Intelligence Provider Silver Tail Systems
EMC plans to use the purchase to beef up its RSA security division in the rapidly growing Web fraud detection market. The software will "complement" RSA's anti-fraud solutions that help leading banks and retailers thwart sophisticated cyberattacks.


The Battle of the Titans: What it all means for IT managers caught in the middle
The sands are rapidly shifting in enterprise IT but the quick witted IT professionals will understand that they are no longer a provider of technology for their company but a broker. It’s not for them to decide what mobile platforms to use but for their execs, line of business owners and end users to decide.


The Report of My Death Was an Exaggeration
That night, my more experienced director wrote up 100 lines of Perl script to replace the few thousand lines of Java code. The point isn’t that Java was bad, it was that just in this particular case, Perl was more efficient for the problem at hand. People still use Perl, they still use Cobol, but they also use C, C++, C# and of course Java.


Cross-platform development tools boost Windows Phone 8
This is the first time so many open-source and cross-platform frameworks are on board with Windows Phone on the first day of a new SDK version release, according to a blog posted by Olivier Bloch, technical evangelist at Microsoft.


2012 Top Scary Trends in Tech
In previous years, the monsters were such awful ghouls, ghosts and goblins as Unreliable Clouds, IT Consolidation, Virtual Workplaces, The Never-Ending Workday and Cyber Bullies from Hell. This year, I've got a bunch of new ones for you, so let's crack open a fresh bucket of chilled monkey brains and get our B-movie rolling.


Business Processes are Still a Manual Affair
Less than half of business processes are automated and manual tasks for BI and reporting are especially burdensome as IT leaders can’t carry through on their interests with a lack of enterprise capabilities, according to new survey findings.


A Vote for Constructive Office Politics
In the world of negotiation, there’s a profound difference between focusing on your own position … the “I want” versus your opponent’s “I want.” Negotiating around the “I wants” is not much different than engaging in a playground squabble. The playground approach offers no rational mechanism for going from disagreement to agreement, short of who’s bigger and tougher.


Lack of Abuse Detection Allows Cloud Computing Instances to Be Used Like Botnets
Some cloud providers fail to detect and block malicious traffic originating from their networks, which provides cybercriminals with an opportunity to launch attacks in a botnet-like fashion, according to a report from Australian security consultancy firm Stratsec.


How to Delegate – 7 steps
You’re snowed under; you have too many meetings to attend and not enough hours in the day to get the work done. Does that sound familiar? You also have a team of pretty capable people and know that you should delegate more; in fact, you keep saying to yourself “I must delegate more” but never quite get around to it.

---

Quotes for the day:
 
"It is impossible to win the race unless you venture to run, impossible to win the victory unless you dare to battle. " -- Richard M. DeVos
 
"Swallow your pride occasionally... it's non-fattening!" -- Unknown

---