John Basso

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)

Machine Learning and Google Car | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #ML #API

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? | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #Wearables

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)

Similarities Between School Lunch & Software Development | @CloudExpo #Cloud #Software

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)

Don't Throw the Baby Out with the Bathwater | @CloudExpo #Cloud

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)