puttin’ on my work hat
You are currently browsing the archive for the Technology category.
In short, if your systems failed in the Amazon cloud this week, it wasn’t Amazon’s fault. You either deemed an outage of this nature an acceptable risk or you failed to design for Amazon’s cloud computing model.
via The AWS Outage: The Cloud’s Shining Moment – O’Reilly Broadcast.
Tags: foundation, performance, security
InfoWorld’s Galen Gruman likes to offer an authoritarian opinion about tech subjects, but rarely has any clue what he’s talking about. That’t evident in his “peace plan” regarding Adobe and Apple.
via InfoWorld’s Galen Gruman fails to understand Apple, Adobe Flash — RoughlyDrafted Magazine.
The first crop of iPad user apps revived memories of Web designs from 1993, when Mosaic first introduced the image map that made it possible for any part of any picture to become a UI element. As a result, graphic designers went wild: anything they could draw could be a UI, whether it made sense or not.
via iPad Usability: First Findings From User Testing Jakob Nielsens Alertbox.
Tags: usability
Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Sun are now fueling the growing fire around the database-as-a-service and cloud database markets, but what’s the difference between these offerings and what’s the appeal? Database guru Don Feinberg defines terms and raises important questions about reliability and security.
The IBM Data Warehousing Satisfaction Survey shows that more than 56 percent of data warehouses have been in production for over six years
Avoiding Common Dashboard Pitfalls
Like instruments in an airplane cockpit, dashboards help executives see the direction they are heading, gain critical insights before serious problems occur and receive proactive warning signals for real-time decision-making. Effective dashboards display the current status of critical business performance indicators, viewed in context alongside historical results and strategic goals. As a result, decision-makers see flare-ups that demand immediate attention as well as organizational trends that deserve long-term course correction.
Indigo: Microsoft “Indigo” Frequently Asked Questions (“Longhorn” Technical Articles)
Service-orientation describes a new method for architecting connected systems, and is based upon three simple concepts:
A service is a program that other programs interact with using messages.
A client is a program that makes services usable to people.
A connected system is a collection of inter-connected services and clients.
Instead of integrating disparate applications via direct object activations as in distributed object systems, applications expose a set of “services” that other applications can utilize. �With service-orientation, applications running on different platforms and programmed using different development platforms can fully interoperate. In addition, application developers and system integrators do not require specific knowledge of the underlying object models, type systems and protocols of the software being integrated.�Instead, all applications expose their services using standards-based protocols and policy definitions that can be dynamically acquired. �This ‘uncoupling’ of the applications that comprise connected systems enables simpler integration, more flexibility in adapting systems to changes over time, and also enables more reliable operations.
Is this the next technology framework change for the system that is yet to be complete?
How do we cope with building new systems that take years to develop and deploy when the whole infrastructure changes before the first “complete” product can be build?
InfoWorld: Identity’s federated future: September 03, 2004: By Neil McAllister : DATA_MANAGEMENT : SECURITY : STANDARDSThat’s a federated system in action. Out of mutual self-interest, using simple authentication at the point of transaction, participating banks have agreed to trust one another to supply funds from their respective vaults. The banks remain separate entities, but the flow of transactions is shared, creating a federated network. Edited.
Forrester Research: The ETL Tool Market is Back and Growing | DM Review | Industry Led, Industry Read
With IT budgets reduced and frozen in 2002, spending on extraction, transformation and load (ETL) tools grew a paltry 3 percent over 2001. When budgets thawed in 2003, spending shot up 17 percent due to the pent-up demand. These extremes do not accurately represent the ETL market’s growth potential, so Forrester forecasts a moderate growth rate of 10 percent for 2004-2006.
About PRISM
The Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) specification defines an XML metadata vocabulary for managing, aggregating, post-processing, multi-purposing and aggregating magazine, news, catalog, book, and mainstream journal content. PRISM recommends the use of certain existing standards, such as XML, RDF, the Dublin Core, and various ISO specifications for locations, languages, and date/time formats. In addition PRISM provides a framework for the interchange and preservation of content and metadata, a collection of elements to describe that content, and a set of controlled vocabularies listing the values for those elements.