As I wrote earlier this year over at InfoWorld, Microsoft took another step
toward being king of the cloud hill when it announced in January that it was
releasing its Azure stack to the public. There are many technical reasons why
this is cool, but more importantly, it's the psychological advantage this
gives Microsoft.
Google has always had the ability for developers using its stack to develop
locally on the same tools that run in Google App Engine. It recently forked
its environments, so now the local and cloud environments are slightly
different for some of the configurations -- I can't tell you how many nights
I have lost sleep because of environments being slightly different!
Development and hosting are two completely different things. What Microsoft
did is one-upped Google and Amazon.
The psychological advantage comes into play for companies that aren't 100 ... (more)
Google self-driving car finally causes an accident - a lesson in AI.
According to The Verge, Google had recently performed a software update
that changed the behavior to be more human like.
"So several weeks ago we began giving the self-driving car the capabilities
it needs to do what human drivers do: hug the rightmost side of the lane."
The truth is that one of the complaints about self-driving cars is that they
are too cautious so Google adapted the software so the car would move to the
far right of the lane so two cars could fit in the single wide lane. This
is what a regular... (more)
Wearable Tech: Here to Stay, or Passing Fad?
Wearable technology has come a long way since the calculator watch. In the
past whenever I thought of the term "wearable technology" the first things I
would think of were always calculator watches and pedometers, but boy have
things changed! Even if you're a skeptic, this blogger thinks that pretty
much everyone will be using some type of wearable tech by 2020.
The Next Big Thing in...Fashion?
It seems like wearable technology is everywhere. Whether it is Google Glass,
or the Samsung Galaxy Gear, there seems to be nothing that you can't... (more)
Shocking Similarities Between School Lunch & Software Development
The need to add more features on shorter release cycles is ubiquitous. At
some point we will reach the threshold of gaining efficiencies and quality
will begin to degrade. There is some evidence that we've reached and crossed
that threshold already.
In the late 1960's the National School Lunch Program was struggling to keep
up with the growing number of children needing assistance. To combat the
issue The Child Nutrition Act was passed in 1966, but eventually
privatization of school lunches was seen as the only aff... (more)
It's a well-known adage, ‘Don't throw the baby out with the bath water'.
These days we generally don't toss our bathwater out the window, nor do we
make a baby take the last bath - but we should probably still heed this
advice. Especially when we consider adopting and transitioning to new
technologies.
Benefits of Moving to the Cloud
For companies moving their services or their infrastructure to the Cloud
there are some obvious benefits: often the costs are lower, data can be
accessed from desperate locations, and less maintenance is required.
Features ‘Thrown Out' in the Move to... (more)