Coming back from the EMC World conference in Las Vegas I was looking at the people playing on the slots and making ridiculous bets at Craps and wondering 'don't these people know anything about statistics?'. Lets be clear I get the idea of it being fun, but when you
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There is something that is beginning to irritate me, ok something else. Its mobile applications that don't cache. I'm fed up of travelling on a train or being on a plane and the end result being that my iPad or iPhone app doesn't work because I'm in an area that
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In all of my career to date in IT there really has been three clear worlds in IT, the software development guys who are the bespoke tailors, the package guys who deliver off the shelf and the BI guys.
I'm going to admit a prejudice here. Until a couple of
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You know when people laugh at the fashion industry for saying that 'blue is the new black' and because of its ridiculous amount of fawning over models, designers and the like? Is that really different to IT? We've got our fashion houses - Google, Facebook, Apple. We've got the big
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At the recent Hadoop Summit in Amsterdam I noticed something that has been bothering me for a while. Lots of companies have done some great Proof of Concepts with Hadoop but they are rarely turning those into fully blown operational solutions. Being clear I'm not talking about the shiny, shiny
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Oh the chanting is out, Big Data, Fast Data, the three 'V's and of course the ubiquitous elephant are roaming across the IT landscape as the next great hype monster. Its going the same way as pretty much every IT hype exercise. Yes this links to the hype cycle but the
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There is a famous phrase
In the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king
IT has always had a problem communicating with the business, and the business communicating with IT. To fix this IT created something called Enterprise Architecture which aimed to provide a framework around the
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A few years ago I wrote an article about "When Big Data is a Big Con" which talked about some of the hype issues around Big Data. One of the key points I raised was about how many folks were just slapping on Big Data badges to the same old
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I've had an experience in the last few months with the folks from BT that really brought home how bad support can be when they have a real issue and how they look to trot out excuses to fob you off when they dont actually have a fix.
So in
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Back in 2006 I wrote a post on why JavaSE 6 wasn't for the Enterprise with all of the cruft that had been added and one comment I made around the inclusion of a Web Server was its potential impact on security. Well it appears that thanks to this bloatware approach
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One of the things that annoys me sometimes, and its quite a long list, is when people proclaim something as 'new' when in fact its just a case that its gone mainstream. The problem I have with this is that it normally means that they've forgotten all of the learnings
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Right now in the UK there are hundreds if not thousands of trains around the UK, all moving at different speeds and going on various routes across millions of rails, switches, points and other things. This gives billions of pieces of information.
But right here, right now I just want
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There are lots of stats out there about CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers), CFOs and COOs now spending more on IT than the IT department. Lots of this spend is on SaaS solutions and information centric solutions. The previously powerful IT department has dropped out of contention in many cases because
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A friend of mine the other day said an amazing thing
I like coding in C++
I mean, seriously? The land of friends, of people writing C code and debugging nightmares, had things got that much better, I mean I know there are some good threading libraries now but seriously,
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Hopefully Oracle will finally look at Java with this zero day exploit and realise that part of the reason for the issue is the kitchen sink approach taken by the Java leadership at Sun and now Oracle. It adds needless complexity and with that adds security risks. A better approach
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Sometimes when you are in a meeting someone says something brilliant, I had that experience today when someone said 'We have a sick body, can we please stop pretending everyone is a surgeon'. Her point was simple, historically in the company they have had challenges of people having opinions and
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Over the past few years I've heard lots of complaints about 'the internet was better before everyone used Facebook' and it got me thinking. That much like the strata in rocks you can determine your geological internet age based on the first thing you remember complaining about. So moving backwards
Smartazoic
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I've always believed that sometimes teaching is about the stick as well as the carrot but there are very clear rules on when to use the stick and how to use it.
Its not good enough to start with shouting, that marks you down as an idiot and a prat.
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Back in 2007 I gave a presentation on Java whose theme was that Java had won.
On slide 12 I put forward a proposal that I'd talked about here before as well in that Java needs to be professional and critically reduce to having a small core on which people can
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Following up from the concept of thinking being dead I'd like to talk now about one of the biggest challenges in IT.
How do you spot those people who are bluffing?
And here I mean people who don't really think they are bluffing because they are rubbish, or those that
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