http://jezebel.com/in-literature-and-in-life-men-and-women-still-want-dif-1754966944
"Not all, but many men are only comfortable when they can have the last word," Baroness Greenfield wrote.
Still true today
Saturday, January 30, 2016
A Timeline of the Tragic Shuttle Launch That Changed NASA Forever
http://gizmodo.com/a-timeline-of-the-tragic-shuttle-launch-that-changed-na-1755746292
Worth reading, although I would like to know more about why NASA did not already have a robust approach to managing risk!
Friday, January 29, 2016
Moon is Earth's mini-me
http://m.phys.org/news/2016-01-moon-head-on-collision-earth-planet.html
"The moon was formed by a violent, head-on collision between the early Earth and a "planetary embryo" called Theia approximately 100 million years after the Earth formed, UCLA geochemists and colleagues report."
Microsoft Stacks Azure Up Against AWS
http://www.nextplatform.com/2015/05/01/microsoft-stacks-azure-up-against-aws/
""I thought I'd just spend a little bit of time talking about how now Azure is even better [than Redshift]," he said, first focusing on the fact that a user can independently adjust the amount of compute and storage that you use with SQL Data Warehouse, as opposed to the fixed ratio required by Redshift. "This allows you to reduce costs and pay only for what you actually need," he noted.
SQL Data Warehouse, he said, will allow you to automatically scale up your data warehouse "in seconds." Not so with Redshift, Guthrie claimed, dissing AWS's service because "typically it takes hours or even days to rescale your data warehouse, and your data warehouse goes into a read-only mode with [performance] degradation.""
Thursday, January 28, 2016
Microsoft's Bet On The Cloud Is Paying Off | Fast Company
http://www.fastcompany.com/3056077/fast-feed/microsofts-bet-on-the-cloud-is-paying-off
"But during the earnings call, Nadella and other Microsoft execs stressed the success of the company's cloud computing platform, Azure, and productivity software, Office 365—both of which showed significant growth. Azure's revenue jumped 140%, while Office 365 expanded by 70% and now boasts 20.6 million consumer subscribers.
Since Microsoft reports its Azure revenue within what it calls the Intelligent Cloud division, it's unclear how much Azure, in particular, raked in; the cloud unit as a whole, however, brought in $6.3 billion, a 5% increase from last year. Same goes for Office 365, which falls under the umbrella productivity category that drew $6.7 billion in revenue (a 2% decrease).
Amazon—which also presented its earnings this afternoon—revealed today that its competing cloud computing product, Amazon Web Services, is seemingly growing at a slower rate than Microsoft's product, despite being the industry leader. The service brought in $2.4 billion in revenue, up 69% from last year."
My comment: If the Intelligent Cloud revenue improvement of $600M is solely due to Cloud, and the rest of that groups performance was flat, then Microsoft's Cloud business is now about $1B, having increased from $428M. Could this be true? It has to be something on that order. If Azure is so big, why not report the revenue # directly?
Samsung Galaxy Note 5, Galaxy S6 Edge+ Specs And Features: AT&T And Verizon Models Won’t Boot Up After Rooting [EXCLUSIVE]
"Samsung Knox is heavily ingrained within the Android framework and the kernel of Samsung's devices...
In particular, Samsung Knox includes a Root of Trust, which dictates what tasks a device can execute with confidence. Some of the functions of a Root of Trust are detecting rootkits and recognizing unauthorized changes to a smartphone's system or program. This especially speaks to the Verizon and AT&T models of the Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 Edge+ as Verizon and AT&T are especially adverse to customization of their devices."
I think this means that I am never going to be able to recover my 2000 Cambodia pictures from my Galaxy S6. There is no way to inspect the file system and see deleted files without rooting, and Samsung has robustly eliminated the ability to root. Beware all of you who take pictures solely thru your smartphone... One day you will be sorry.
If you lose the file pointers to your pictures before you can get back to your hotel room to sync, you will be screwed. Maybe it's only one days worth but those could be priceless pictures.
When I posted my tale of woe to Facebook, many replied saying they had experienced the same thing, losing all their pictures. So I know I'm not the only one. Very sad.
Friday, January 22, 2016
NYTimes: Apps to Manage Passwords So They Are Harder to Crack Than ‘Password’
Apps to Manage Passwords So They Are Harder to Crack Than 'Password'
Evaluating the merits of Dashlane, 1Password, LastPass and other methods of keeping long lists of increasingly complex passwords safe and accessible.
http://nyti.ms/1V8HQqs
1Password is the recommended app.
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Star Wars Terms among 2015's Worst Passwords - Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/star-wars-terms-among-2015-s-worst-passwords/
"If you read our previous reports, you won't be shocked that "123456" is still the most common dumb password, with "password" still occupying the No. 2 spot. The rest of the top 10 were similarly eye-rolling: "12345678," "qwerty," "12345," "123456789," "football," "1234," "1234567" and "baseball," in that order.
SplashData also drew attention to three relatively new entries: "princess," "solo" and "starwars." "
Monday, January 18, 2016
2016-roundup-of-cloud-computing-and-enterprise-software-predictions
Adaptive Security Architecture
The complexities of digital business and the algorithmic economy combined with an emerging "hacker industry" significantly increase the threat surface for an organization. Relying on perimeter defense and rule-based security is inadequate, especially as organizations exploit more cloud-based services and open APIs for customers and partners to integrate with their systems. IT leaders must focus on detecting and responding to threats, as well as more traditional blocking and other measures to prevent attacks. Application self-protection, as well as user and entity behavior analytics, will help fulfill the adaptive security architecture.
The complexities of digital business and the algorithmic economy combined with an emerging "hacker industry" significantly increase the threat surface for an organization. Relying on perimeter defense and rule-based security is inadequate, especially as organizations exploit more cloud-based services and open APIs for customers and partners to integrate with their systems. IT leaders must focus on detecting and responding to threats, as well as more traditional blocking and other measures to prevent attacks. Application self-protection, as well as user and entity behavior analytics, will help fulfill the adaptive security architecture.
Advanced System Architecture
The digital mesh and smart machines require intense computing architecture demands to make them viable for organizations. Providing this required boost are high-powered and ultraefficient neuromorphic architectures. Fueled by field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as an underlining technology for neuromorphic architectures, there are significant gains to this architecture, such as being able to run at speeds of greater than a teraflop with high-energy efficiency.
"Systems built on GPUs and FPGAs will function more like human brains that are particularly suited to be applied to deep learning and other pattern-matching algorithms that smart machines use," said Mr. Cearley. "FPGA-based architecture will allow further distribution of algorithms into smaller form factors, with considerably less electrical power in the device mesh, thus allowing advanced machine learning capabilities to be proliferated into the tiniest IoT endpoints, such as homes, cars, wristwatches and even human beings."
Mesh App and Service Architecture
Monolithic, linear application designs (e.g., the three-tier architecture) are giving way to a more loosely coupled integrative approach: the apps and services architecture. Enabled by software-defined application services, this new approach enables Web-scale performance, flexibility and agility. Microservice architecture is an emerging pattern for building distributed applications that support agile delivery and scalable deployment, both on-premises and in the cloud. Containers are emerging as a critical technology for enabling agile development and microservice architectures. Bringing mobile and IoT elements into the app and service architecture creates a comprehensive model to address back-end cloud scalability and front-end device mesh experiences. Application teams must create new modern architectures to deliver agile, flexible and dynamic cloud-based applications with agile, flexible and dynamic user experiences that span the digital mesh.
Internet of Things Platforms
IoT platforms complement the mesh app and service architecture. The management, security, integration and other technologies and standards of the IoT platform are the base set of capabilities for building, managing and securing elements in the IoT. IoT platforms constitute the work IT does behind the scenes from an architectural and a technology standpoint to make the IoT a reality. The IoT is an integral part of the digital mesh and ambient user experience and the emerging and dynamic world of IoT platforms is what makes them possible.
Saturday, January 16, 2016
Has Wal-Mart Finally Hit the Saturation Point?
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/8999470
"f Wal-Mart were to eliminate every store within 10 miles of another Wal-Mart, it would thin out its unit count by at least 25%. "
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Baby, I'm back
Time again to start up a business-oriented blog now that I work in a Cloud service company. 140 characters is way too limiting and I don't want to mix this with my family's blog, or hide it behind my company's firewall.
The Motley Fool: Amazon Is Chasing After (and Winning) a $191 Billion Prize
The Motley Fool: Amazon Is Chasing After (and Winning) a $191 Billion Prize. http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIwqZTNsSc
Working at Amazon
"Bezos created a technological and retail giant by relying on some of the same
impulses: eagerness to tell others how to behave; an instinct for bluntness
bordering on confrontation; and an overarching confidence in the power of
metrics, buoyed by his experience in the early 1990s at D. E. Shaw, a financial
firm that overturned Wall Street convention by using algorithms to get the most
out of every trade.
According to early
executives and employees, Mr. Bezos was determined almost from the moment he
founded Amazon in 1994 to resist the forces he thought sapped businesses over
time — bureaucracy, profligate spending, lack of rigor. As the company grew, he
wanted to codify his ideas about the workplace, some of them proudly
counterintuitive, into instructions simple enough for a new worker to
understand, general enough to apply to the nearly limitless number of
businesses he wanted to enter and stringent enough to stave off the mediocrity
he feared.
“You can work long,
hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three,” Mr. Bezos
wrote in his 1997 letter to shareholders, when the company sold only books, and
which still serves as a manifesto. He added that when he interviewed potential
hires, he warned them, “It’s not easy to work here.”
At Amazon, workers
are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and
late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they
were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are
“unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how
to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently
used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt
concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)
Some veterans
interviewed said they were protected from pressures by nurturing bosses or
worked in relatively slow divisions. But many others said the culture stoked
their willingness to erode work-life boundaries, castigate themselves for
shortcomings (being “vocally self-critical” is included in the description of
the leadership principles) and try to impress a company that can often feel
like an insatiable taskmaster. Even many Amazonians who have worked on Wall
Street and at start-ups say the workloads at the new South Lake Union campus
can be extreme: marathon conference calls on Easter Sunday and Thanksgiving,
criticism from bosses for spotty Internet access on vacation, and hours spent
working at home most nights or weekends."
TechCrunch: The Hierarchy of IoT “Thing” Needs.
TechCrunch: The Hierarchy of IoT "Thing" Needs. http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIwutWsjiU
PCWorld: IBM launches its data warehouse service into the cloud.
PCWorld: IBM launches its data warehouse service into the cloud. http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIw8YOAmyM
Past Prime? The Great Disruptor Amazon Is In Danger Of Being Disrupted. - Forbes
"In early 2014, Amazon was reportedly in talks with retailers including J.Crew, Abercrombie & Fitch and Neiman Marcus to carry those brand's listings on its site – that deal never materialized.
The next phase of major disruption in retail is here, driven by endless touch points, the convenience of physical stores, social commerce, and a personalized brand experience. Disruption is the natural selection of the business world, causing seemingly unbeatable companies to become beatable. Forbes pointed out that that fifty years ago, the life expectancy of a company on the Fortune 500 was about 75 years. It is less than 15 years today and falling."
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