Author Archive for homer

The consumerization of IT- The next-generation CIO

Published on December 13, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From PwC’s Center for Technology and Innovation:

Users’ demands that they be allowed to use technologies of their own choosing isn’t a fad that will fade. CIOs can’t squelch these demands—nor should they. The consumerization of IT is a symptom of a shift in workplace expectations that has been brewing for years and is now reaching an inflection point.

From the time of the Hollerith’s punched cards, information technology has been changing the way business is done. It has enabled larger-sized enterprises, more agile enterprises, and has also made possible stunning and catastrophic mistakes. The introduction of personal computers, as this report emphasizes, was a particularly disruptive event. Contemporary mobile computing in tandem with cloud services and social network systems promises to have at least as large an impact as the placement of a PC on every desk in the office.

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Google 21st Century Robber Baron

Published on September 21, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Scott Cleland at Forbes:

In June, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt publicly asserted “we’re a law abiding company.” Wednesday the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee will test that public representation when Mr. Schmidt testifies publicly under oath for the first time. Overwhelming evidence belies Google’s ‘Don’t be evil’ credo and corroborates that Google has become the 21st century’s quintessential robber baron. No “law abiding company” has this long of a rap sheet.

Cleland has a strong opinion. Others may have equally strong opinions more favorable to Google. The Internet, and the World Wide Web which inhabits it, are environments that have existed no more than half of a human lifetime. Few social institutions have grown so fast and penetrated people’s lives so thoroughly. They are not like the weather, happenings largely or entirely beyond human influence. How can humanity as a whole make intelligent choices concerning their impact on ourselves and our descendants?

For the article…

Image: Guillaume Paumier / Wikimedia Commons

IBM’s New Chips Compute More Like We Do

Published on August 18, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

Brain games: A new IBM chip "reads" a researcher’s handwriting. Credit: IBM Research (from the article)

From Katherine Bourzac in Technology Review:

A microchip with about as much brain power as a garden worm might not seem very impressive, compared with the blindingly fast chips in modern personal computers. But a new microchip made by researchers at IBM represents a landmark. Unlike an ordinary chip, it mimics the functioning of a biological brain—a feat that could open new possibilities in computation.

Inside the brain, information is processed in parallel, and computation and memory are entwined. Each neuron is connected to many others, and the strength of these connections changes constantly as the brain learns. These dynamics are thought to be crucial to learning and memory, and they are what the researchers sought to mimic in silicon. Conventional chips, by contrast, process one bit after another and shunt information between a discrete processor and memory components. The bigger a problem is, the larger the number of bits that must be shuffled around.

The IBM researchers have built and tested two demonstration chips that store and process information in a way that mimics a natural nervous system. The company says these early chips could be the building blocks for something much more ambitious: a computer the size of a shoebox that has about half the complexity of a human brain and consumes just one kilowatt of power. This is being developed with $21 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, in collaboration with several universities.

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Drumming Up More Internet Addresses

Published on February 14, 2011 in News. 1 Comment

From Laurie J. Flynn in The New York Times:

Who could have guessed that 4.3 billion Internet connections wouldn’t be enough?

Certainly not Vint Cerf.

In 1976, Mr. Cerf and his colleagues in the R.& D. office of the Department of Defense had to make a judgment call: how much network address space should they allocate to an experiment connecting computers in an advanced data network?

They debated the question for more than a year. Finally, with a deadline looming, Mr. Cerf decided on a number — 4.3 billion separate network addresses, each one representing a connected device — that seemed to provide more room to grow than his experiment would ever require, far more, in fact, than he could ever imagine needing. And so he was comfortable rejecting the even larger number of addresses that some on his team had argued for.

“It was 1977,” Mr. Cerf said, in an interview last week. “We thought we were doing an experiment.”

“The problem was, the experiment never ended,” added Mr. Cerf, who is the chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, a nonprofit corporation that coordinates the Internet naming system. “We had no idea it would turn into the world’s global communications network.”

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