Category: Technology

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Forward Directions Technology

Libraries Considered Hazardous | February 2019 | Communications of the ACM

Libraries Considered Hazardous | February 2019 | Communications of the ACM:

All this tells us is that persistent accumulation of knowledge requires care and curation over time. One might even imagine that digital online libraries might have the ability to update themselves as new knowledge is added. John McCarthyb once said to me, “Do you know, 100 years from now they will say, ‘100 years ago they had books that didn’t talk to each other!'” It will be an enormous task to devise methods to accumulate and curate digital content and its relevant metadata including provenance and validity. Will computer, information, and library science be up to the task? We can but try.

Books that don’t talk to each other? Who knew?

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Forward Directions Practice Technology

Amazon’s New Customer – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

Amazon’s New Customer – Stratechery by Ben Thompson: “I was reminded of this quote after Amazon announced an agreement to buy Whole Foods for $13.7 billion; after all, it was only two years ago that Whole Foods founder and CEO John Mackey predicted that groceries would be Amazon’s Waterloo. And while Colligan’s prediction was far worse — Apple simply left Palm in the dust, unable to compete — it is Mackey who has to call Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, the Napoleon of this little morality play, boss.”

This is an insightful view of the Whole Foods purchase. Want to shop with me online?

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Technology

The Apple iWatch | askTog

Passcodes. The watch can and should, for most of us, eliminate passcodes altogether on iPhones, and Macs and, if Apple’s smart, PCs: As long as my watch is in range, let me in!

via The Apple iWatch | askTog:

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Practice Technology

The AWS Outage: The Cloud's Shining Moment

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.

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Technology

InfoWorld’s Galen Gruman fails to understand Apple, Adobe Flash

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.

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Technology

iPad Usability: First Findings From User Testing

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.

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Technology

Gartner's Don Feinberg on Database as a Service and Cloud DBs

IntelligentEnterprise : Q&A With Gartner’s Don Feinberg on Database as a Service and Cloud DBs (printable version):

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.

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Technology

The Data Warehouse Satisfaction Survey, Part 1: The Number One Complaint About Data Warehousing – DMReview

The Data Warehouse Satisfaction Survey, Part 1: The Number One Complaint About Data Warehousing – DMReview

The IBM Data Warehousing Satisfaction Survey shows that more than 56 percent of data warehouses have been in production for over six years

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BI Technology

Avoiding Common Dashboard Pitfalls

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.

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Discussion Items Technology

Indigo: Microsoft

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?