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Submission + - IBM researcher: Companies won't invest in data privacy until society demands it (citeworld.com)

Submitted by rsmiller510
rsmiller510 writes: Of course we have the ability today to collect all kinds of data on people, but what we lack is the art of subtlety when it comes to using that data to understand people better and give a personalized experience that feels amazing instead of creepy. IBM researcher Marie Wallace says that as a society we are far behind our abilities to collect and process data, and we need to demand data privacy so that our politicians and the companies we frequent online will take us seriously. But do we have the gumption to ask?

Submission + - How to Tell Your Client That His "Expert" is an Idiot

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: It’s a danger for any consultant, and for most inter-departmental internal project staff: To get the work done, you need to work with someone else who supplies expertise you lack. But when the “expert” turns out to be the wrong person how do you tell the client (or boss) that you just can’t work with that individual? It’s possible to do so, but it does take a deft hand. Here's one set of instructions, but surely there are plenty more you could add.

Submission + - Android can't escape the Pandora's Box of openness (citeworld.com)

Submitted by rsmiller510
rsmiller510 writes: As a large company with a target on its back, Google has to walk a fine line when it comes to Android. That's because when it made Android open source, it left it vulnerable to forking where it could eventually lose control of its own project. It's an issue Oracle has faced in the past and one Google has to be wary of even if as a mature OS, it's more difficult to pull off at scale.

Submission + - The Standards Wars and the Sausage Factory 1

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: We all know how important tech standards are. But the making of them is sometimes a particularly ugly process. Years, millions of dollars, and endless arguments are spent arguing about standards. The reason for our fights aren’t any different from those that drove Edison and Westinghouse: It’s all about who benefits – and profits – from a standard.

As just one example, Steven Vaughan-Nichols details the steps it took to approve a networking standard that everyone, everyone knew was needed: "Take, for example, the long hard road for the now-universal IEEE 802.11n Wi-Fi standard. There was nothing new about the multiple-in, multiple-out (MIMO) and channel-bonding techniques when companies start moving from 802.11g to 802.11n in 2003. Yet it wasn’t until 2009 that the standard became official."

Submission + - When the Project Manager Is the Problem

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: Project managers need to be great traffic cops, coordinators, and problem solvers. When they do their jobs right, they make everyone around them more effective. But when they’re bad — ouch. They can become the worst sort of bottleneck, and inspiration for a lot of heavy drinking.

The question is: How can you tell that the source of the problem is the project manager rather than the situation in which an otherwise-good project manager finds herself? And even when it's obvious, what can you do about it? In The Cure After Diagnosing a Bad Project Manager, Tim Walker helps you identify when it’s the project manager who’s the problem as well as causes and some useful, non-career-limiting solutions. ("Copy out, then copy up" might have been useful to me in one poopstorm.)

Got suggestions to add to his list?

Submission + - Why VMware just spent $1.54 billion on AirWatch (citeworld.com)

Submitted by rsmiller510
rsmiller510 writes: By now you've heard the news that VMware spent $1.54 billion to purchase AirWatch, but the real story isn't that they did it, but why they did it and what that means to the mobile device management market. It's worth noting, for instance that this is the fourth deal by a large company for an MDM vendor in the last year or so, but this one's a little different because AirWatch is the belle of the ball and the one company with a significant customer base and that's actually making money. And you can be sure that there are big companies out there pausing this morning and seeing which players are left on the board.

Submission + - To get data to work for you, package it like the big data companies (citeworld.com)

Submitted by rsmiller510
rsmiller510 writes: Just about every company by now understands the power of big data to help transform decision making, but it's much harder to take all that information and present it in a way that makes sense and allows you to put it to work. You could actually learn a lot about how to do this by mimicking how big data companies package and sell their data and apply these same principles to create packages of data to help lines of business answer key questions about marketing, sales, R&D and other key business areas.

Submission + - Moving beyond Snowden, what kind of country does America want to be (computerworld.com)

Submitted by rsmiller510
rsmiller510 writes: We've pretty much exhausted the Edward Snowden debate. You may think he's a hero or a villain, but whatever you think you can't undo what he did. The genie is out of the bottle and we now what we know about the extent of government surveillance. We can't pretend we don't, so the time has come to debate the issues and figure just what level of surveillance is required to make us safe --and if we can do it within the rule of law or continue to give security apparatus carte blance to monitor anyone's activities at any time, regardless of whether they are suspected of a crime or not.

Submission + - OF COURSE I want a Star Trek Bridge at home!

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: Anyone who hangs out on slashdot can be relied on for Star Trek literacy if not fandom. As Carol Pinchefsky writes, "Chances are you've wanted to live on the Enterprise, quaff a glass of tranya and wager your quatloos on a death match. You can't — not until quatloos are legal tender. But if you're Line Rainville, you can have the next best thing: a full-sized basement that replicates the spirit of the NCC-1701." And so, in Fan explains why she spent $30,000 to re-create the bridge of Star Trek's Enterprise, Pinchefsky interviews the woman who made that kind of investment. Admit it: Even if you think this is overboard, you want to peek at the photos.

Submission + - Fedora 21 Linux is a 'Null' (eweek.com) 1

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro writes: What follows in the footsteps of a Heisenbug, Spherical Cow and a Beefy Miracle? Apparently the answer is 'null' as is nothing. Fedora Linux 21 could well have no funky new name as its past predecessors have all had, thanks to a recent vote by the Fedora board to move away from the existing naming practices. Fedora 21 itself will not be out in the first half of 2014 either, instead the plan is now for a release sometime around August. A delayed release however doesn't mean somethign is wrong, it actually could mean that something is very right, and Red Hat's community Linux distro aims to re-invent itself.

Submission + - The Pre-History of Software as a Service

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: Nowadays, everyone uses Software as a Service; it's the one part of cloud computing that doesn't make anybody sneer. But some of us are old enough to remember that we tried this business model before, over a decade ago, and it failed miserably. What changed in cloud computing to make SaaS work today, when few Application Service Providers survived?

Steven Vaughan-Nichols and I worked together at Sm@rt Reseller magazine in the late 90s during the heyday of ASPs (along with Mary Jo Foley, Debbie Gage, Jason Perlow, and other journalists whose names you know), and we got into a discussion about what made SaaS work where ASPs failed. In The Pre-History of Software as a Service, sjvn goes into the reasons... and no, it's not just a matter of virtualization technologies.

Submission + - A Short History of Computers in the Movies

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: The big screen has always tried to keep step with technology usually unsuccessfully. Peter Salus looks at how the film industry has treated computing.

For a long time, the "product placement" of big iron was limited to a few brands, primarily Burroughs. For instance:

Batman: The Movie and Fantastic Voyage (both 1966) revert to the archaic Burroughs B205, though Fantastic Voyage also shows an IBM AN/FSQ-7 Combat Direction Central. At 250 tons for each installation (there were about two dozen) the AN/FSQ-7 was the largest computer ever built, with 60,000 vacuum tubes and a requirement of 3 megawatts of power to perform 75,000 ips for regional radar centers. The last IBM AN/FSQ-7, at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, was demolished in February 1984.

Fun reading, I think.

Submission + - SF movies teach us project management skills

Submitted by Esther Schindler
Esther Schindler writes: Or maybe they don't, but it's certainly fun to pretend to find work inspiration from our favorite SF films. That's what Carol Pinchefsky does in two posts, one about positive business lessons you can take away from SF films (such as "agile thinking can save many a project (and project manager) in a crisis" from Robocop and team motivation lessons from Buffy), and the other, 5 Project Management Horror Stories Found in Sci-Fi Movies, with examples of the impact of poor documentation on Captain America.

It's worth a giggle and, maybe, a thoughtful moment.

Submission + - DRM has always been a horrible idea (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: For years, the reaction of the big entertainment companies to digital disruption has been to try and restrict and control, a wrong-headed approach that was bound to backfire. But the entertainment companies were never known for being forward thinking whether it was radio in the 20s or cassette tapes in the 70s or VCRs in the 80s or Napster in the 90s. The reaction was the always the same. Take a defensive position and try to battle the disruptive force --and it never worked.

And DRM was perhaps the worst reaction of all, place restrictions on your content that punish the very people who were willing to pay for it, while others were free to use it without restriction. It was an approach that never made much sense, and it's good to know that mounting evidence proves that's the case.

Submission + - Cell phone location data: Today the police, tomorrow the world (citeworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Just because you're paranoid department....

Another day and more revelations about the NSA. This time comes word that they're collecting cell phone location data. And if the NSA can do it, you have to figure that other law enforcement agencies can too, and if they can track your location, they can learn an awful lot about you. In fact, they could begin to piece together a detailed profile of where you go, what you do and who your friends are.

Combine that with a growing network of sensor data capturing our location every time we step into sensor's zone, and you may really have a legitimate reason to be paranoid. http://bit.ly/1fpIqg2

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