February 2012
52 posts
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PeteSearch: Why Facebook's data will change our... →
What makes Facebook data so interesting? Let me count the ways!
When I told a friend about my work at Jetpac he nodded sagely and said “You just can’t resist Facebook data can you? Like a dog returning to its own vomit”. He’s right, I’m completely entranced the information we’re pouring into the service. All my privacy investigations were by-products of my...
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HP Announces Gen8 Servers – Focus On Opex And... →
Another good run-down of the HP ProLiant Gen8 - this time from Forrester. They seem to believe this is a pretty significant announcement.
On Monday, February 13, HP announced its next turn of the great wheel for servers with the announcement of its Gen8 family of servers. Interestingly, since the announcement was ahead of Intel’s official announcement of the supporting E5 server CPUs, HP had...
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HP's ProLiant Gen8 control freakery • The Register →
A detailed run-down of HP’s new ProLiant Gen8 servers.
Look out system administrators: Hewlett-Packard wants to give you more time to play video games or polish up your resumes – or both – with the forthcoming launch of its ProLiant Gen8 servers. .
As part of its annual shindig with partners and resellers, which was hosted in Las Vegas a week ago, the biggest server shipper in the...
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Exascale by 2018: Crazy ...or possible? • The... →
A short history of supercomputing and the race to exascale computing.
I recently saw some estimates that show we should hit exascale supercomputer performance by around 2018. That seems a bit ambitious – if not stunningly optimistic – and the search to get some perspective led me on an hours-long meander through supercomputing history, plus what I like to call “Fun With Spreadsheets.”
Right...
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IBM's Anjul Bhambhri on What Is a Data Scientist?... →
This article is much broader than the title would suggest. It’s a really good explanation of IBM’s unique point of view on how to create a holistic value chain around big data.
In order to solve contemporary business problems, a big data strategy is needed much more than any one product. As I explained in my prior article, “Curing the Big Data Storage Fetish,” there is a growing...
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IBM arms robo-sysadmin QRadar with virus know-how... →
Information on an interesting, new security offering from IBM.
IBM is beefing up its enterprise security offerings by creating a security platform that is aware of real-time virus information, meaning that the system will be much quicker at recognising new threats.
Marketing its updated QRadar Security Intelligence Platform as a comprehensive security solution, IBM argue that the platform...
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The Complexity of Measuring Cloud’s Impact on... →
How do you measure cloud’s total cost of ownership? Turns out there’s no easy answer.
Despite the name, total cost of ownership (TCO) is not the measure of “total cost,” as used by economists, but the measure of “accounting cost.” TCO calculations measure some costs and are useful for business decisions, yet these calculations always leave out other costs...
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Whitman says HP turnaround will not happen... →
The latest quarterly report from HP reveals continuing issues… no surprise…
Five months into the role as HP CEO, Meg Whitman is finally detailing the tech titan’s turnaround plan that involves “fixing execution” and cutting costs to save cash before it ups investments in R&D.
In a tough fiscal first quarter, HP ironically saw an upturn in the software and...
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10 Virtualization and Cloud Predictions for 2012 |... →
Some predictions on cloud computing - with a shout out to the mainframe.
1. Brands May Come and Go – But No Technology Will Die
Not only are we not living in a ‘post-PC’ world, we are not even living in a ‘post-mainframe’ world! Cloud will not kill data centers, virtual will not kill physical, tablets will not kill PCs, Mac will not kill Windows, Android will not kill iOS, streaming will not ...
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How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy →
This is an absolutely brilliant example of the smarter planet run haywire. Amazing!
Before I talk about my own troubles, let me tell you about another book, “Computer Game Bot Turing Test”. It’s one of over 100,000 “books” “written” by a Markov chain running over random Wikipedia articles, bundled up and sold online for a ridiculous price. The publisher, Betascript, is notorious for this...
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The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog) →
A great critique of current social networking models based on the so-called “social graph.” Here’s a long-ish snippet:
II. It’s Not Social
The social graph project has roots in something called Friend of a Friend, or FOAF (disclaimer: I worked on a rival project called LOAF, and you may feel free to ascribe everything I say here to purest bitterness).
The idea of FOAF...
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High Scalability - High Scalability - Tumblr... →
A technical look at the infrastructure that supports Tumblr and how it is designed to scale - very interesting as a real world case study.
With over 15 billion page views a month Tumblr has become an insanely popular blogging platform. Users may like Tumblr for its simplicity, its beauty, its strong focus on user experience, or its friendly and engaged community, but like it they do. Growing...
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IBM’s Watson: A First Step in a New Era of... →
A thoughtful piece by IBM’s David Ferrucci on the future of cognitive computing.
A year has passed since the Watson computer developed by my team at IBM Research defeated two all-time champions on the TV quiz show Jeopardy! A lot has happened since then. IBM launched a new business, IBM Watson Solutions, which is tasked with commercializing the technology. The Solutions team is...
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'Linux for cloud' floats anti-Amazon cloud taster... →
OpenStack has opened up a temporary cloud, called TryStack, to try and entice developers away from Amazon.
How does a cloud project solve a problem like Amazon? The once genteel etailer of toasters, books and CDs has now become a byword for “cloud”.
People just can’t stop stuffing more of their data into Amazon’s EC2 service. The number of objects held in EC2’s...
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Cellular automata as pattern generator
mwatz
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EMC crashes the server flash party • The Register →
EMC shook things up a bit last week when they introduced a new, very smart flash storage solution - VFCache. It caches “hot” data (important information that is needed again and again) from a storage array so that servers can access it extremely quickly and efficiently - until its not needed.
The perfect server flash storm hitting storage arrays has generated EMC’s...
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Inside the mind of EMC: Is storage just a... →
A good analysis of where EMC is heading. Hint: it’s not just storage anymore.
It’s a vision thing: EMC was a storage company and is an information company, but in the next decade it looks like it will be a data centre infrastructure company.
This thought comes from a parsing of two Pat Gelsinger replies to an interview with EMC’s Mark Twomey, otherwise known as the blogger...
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Where to Put Flash for Enterprise Performance?... →
IBM and EMC represent two different approaches to enterprise-class flash-based storage.
The approach to utilizing flash for high-performance, enterprise use cases is evolving. Compute-intensive servers have already been enlisted to enable high-performance applications like enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), online transaction processing (OLTP)...
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Decoding Online Chatter: Using Twitter to Spill... →
Interesting article on how IBM and researchers at USC are developing ways to make sense of the twitterverse.
February seems to be a month of excitement for all movie, television and sports enthusiasts. It’s that time of year – Super Bowl madness and Oscar Buzz – frenzy so electric that it transcends worlds – into the social media world. Think about it, how long does it take for you to see a...
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GE Data Visualization →
Following the last post, GE has developed a site specifically for data visualization - “Making Data Work.”
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HP gives sysadmins a little mobility • The... →
HP is upping their game in the mobile administration department. Worth noting.
HP is embracing mobility with apps to allow sysadmins to receive alerts, manage systems and even shut down servers, all from the comfort of their booth seats at the pub.
HP already provides SiteScope, with which one can monitor servers and receive alerts on Android and iOS devices. But in a presentation at the HP...
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EMC Greenplum Hadoop elephant straddles Cisco iron... →
EMC and Cisco are releasing a pretty scary looking converged system featuring the ultra-fast Greenplum Hadoop database.
Well, that took long enough. Cisco Systems and the Greenplum big data unit of server partner EMC have finally gotten together and put the Greenplum wares on Cisco’s Unified Computing System servers.
In a blog posting, Raghunath Nambiar, an architect at Cisco’s...
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