Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 6th August 2012 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them:
News flash: company boards are starting to ‘get’ IT — Cloud Computing News – Even Gartner gets something right occassionally.
Update: The top investment priorities this year are in IT and sales, with 64 percent of respondents predicting budget increases in both areas this year, compared to last. Just over a quarter of respondents (26 percent) said they expect investment in both areas to remain the same and 10 percent said they expected budgets in those areas to decrease this year.
An Unexpected Ass Kicking | Blog Of Impossible Things – Guy in a coffee shop get table-checked by the guy who was a computer pioneer:
I created the world’s first internally programmable computer. It used to take up a space about as big as this whole room and my wife and I used to walk into it to program it.
Great, great story. Go and read it.
Extreme Learning – Interesting
Extreme Learning is defined as using technology for learning purposes in novel, unusual, or nontraditional ways. This includes learning with technology when in various locations such as a park, plane, train, subway, boat, or car. It can also include interactive learning activities when climbing a mountain, visiting a local company, riding a bicycle, working in a war zone, or taking a vacation on a remote island
How Much is Your Old Copper Worth? – Packet Life – Stretch recycles old cabling and makes lunch money.
Profit: $235. The payout for power cables isn’t as high as twisted-pair cabling since a greater portion of the gross weight belongs to the plastic insulation surrounding the valuable copper inside (and presumably because many power cables aren’t pure copper), but that’s still a good chunk of change.
Russian peasants, 1800s | Retronaut – Any day you think your working life is too hard, go and loook at these pictures and thanks the $god/s that technology saved you form a life like this.
Download: BranchCache Technical Overview – Microsoft Download Center – Download Details – Microsoft talks about their BranchCache technology to performance of user content. The end of WAN Acceleration is in sight !!
This document provides an overview of BranchCache, explains the different modes in which BranchCache operates, and describes how BranchCache is configured. The paper also explains how BranchCache works with Web servers and file servers and the steps BranchCache takes to determine that the content is up-to-date.
Why I do what I do. – Got a little emotional here. Josh O’Brien finds meaning in going to work.
So this morning I woke up and got dressed in another hotel in another city heading to another meeting and hoping to get home in time to tuck my kids in kiss my wife good night and wake up to do it all again tomorrow. But today I now know why I do what I do. I do it not simply because technology is cool and I have the attention span of a dead gnat. I do it because technology solves problems. My technology that I bust my ass on every day, that my staff and I loose days worth of sleep over and weeks away from our families, changes the equation for a 12 year old boy who gets to be a kid, who does not have to know that his family owe hundreds of dollars to the hospital at the same time they can’t pay rent, and for a parent to be a parent and choose to protect their kids innocence while the do the hard work of raising them.
Root Cause Analysis for recent Windows Azure Service Interruption in Western Europe – Windows Azure – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Microsoft blames their SDN platform for their recent outage. Isn’t the first, won’t be the last….
We resolved the issue by increasing limit settings in the affected cluster. We also increased the limit settings and improved automated validation across all Windows Azure datacenters. Additionally, we are applying fixes for the identified bugs to the device software. We have also improved our network monitoring systems to detect and mitigate connectivity issues before they affect running services
Using Cisco’s OTV and LISP to Improve Application Availability – Network Computing – My latest at Network Computing talks about the busienss value of OTV and LISP.
You can combine OTV and LISP to deliver a better service. Use OTV to enable VM mobility between data centers and use LISP to ensure that the path from the WAN to the data center is optimal. The two protocols together deliver both service resiliency and redundancy from the infrastructure layer and require little support or integration from the application.
RBS must realise it’s just an IT biz with a banking licence • The Register – Great quote:
“A senior banking technologist has said to me: ‘A retail bank is nothing but an IT company with a banking licence’,” Chan told The Reg. “While this may seem extreme, when one looks at the economics of any retail bank, it is clear that this is the case.”
Despite what the MBA/Analysts say, this is true of many business. IT is probably more important than accounting in most companies and that realisation is slowly coming to fruit inside many larger companies.
