If The Blues Was Whiskey, I’d Stay Drunk All The Time…
continued from here:
Start-up & Transition and Asset Ownership
…
several issues that need to be considered around start-up & transition and asset ownership including:
- Asset ownership: Asset valuations, Lease Types
- Start-up, Transition, Transformation and One-Time Charges: Expensed vs Capitalization
- Restructuring costs
Companies tapping into virtual infrastructure through cloud computing should take another look at their security plans, say experts at the Black Hat Security Conference. From legal protection to phishing, here are five cloud security issues to consider.
Here are they:
Interesting slides from the recent Black Hat conference here. Unfortunately the paper is missing, but probably need just a recheck next week here (or see for Haroon Meer under the speaker on the right side here.
I admit it, I am too curious to pass the opportunity to play with another gadget.
Today has a Arduino landed, fast shipped from Watterod. What a nice toy.
Some link for those that ask themselves “what the hell is an Arduino”.
The projects homepage: www.arduino.cc
Good books on Arduino from O´Reilly:
German c´t had an article recently and as a nice page with a hell of links.
Ideas for dozens answers the question “Why the Arduino Matters“, and yes, this could be true.
Jan-Piet Mens has created a monitor for Nagios and Icinga, the Naguino.
An interesting project is TinkerKit, an Arduino-compatible physical computing prototyping toolkit aimed at design professionals. Still under development, but very interesting.
And finally, O´Reilly has also a book on Arduino in german:
John Klee from TPI starts a series of posts on Accounting Considerations in Sourcing Environments. This is going to be interesting:
What accounting issues can impact the Sourcing strategy and/or RFP structure?
- Asset ownership: asset valuations, embedded leases in service contracts, lease capitalization
- Start-up, transition and one time charges: expensed vs. capitalization
- Potential alliance agreements: Related party transactions, gross vs. net revenue recognition
- Regulatory compliance: Sarbanes-Oxley Act, SAS70, etc
- Pricing structure: service provider revenue recognition
- After collecting cash, recognizing the revenue streams related to those collections is often a Service providers management’s greatest concern
eweek.com: Informatica Launches Data Integration Service in the Cloud
Interesting:
PowerCenter Cloud Edition, which became available on July 23, uses Amazon EC2, Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon S3 (storage) to provide access to enterprise data sources such as relational databases, flat files and SAAS (software-as-a-service)applications.
Bruce Cleveland: The SaaS Business Model and Some Common Legal Questions – worth a read. I believe these kind of issues is way underestimated.
David Linthicum: Will Cloud Computing kill the Datacenter?
Probably not. While cloud computing is a great fit for some applications, and/or other architectural components, it typically won’t be a fit for all applications and/or architectural components. There will always be some data, services, processes, and complete applications that you want to keep within your firewall for a number of reasons, including: Compliance, privacy, fear, control, and cost.
Brian Sommer: Is Your IT Shop Mature Enough for Cloud Computing?
CIOs will need to marry their needs and business requirements with the true capabilities of cloud capability providers. I suspect that some providers offer a cloud ‘space’ and not much else. CIOs will likely need more. They’ll want to work with providers that can advise them on needed capabilities in their application portfolio, changes they’ll need to make in their applications, techniques and technologies required to make cloud apps integrate with legacy apps, etc. If a cloud provider just offers bandwidth and disk storage, their solution may be woefully inadequate.
Yes, that´s what it boils down to. Just the “cloud space” is not that a big step from managed hosting of individual servers.
Joe McKendrick: Do we need cloud oriented architecture?
Absolutely. More than ever, as environments get quite complex if a multitude of services, both external with multiple providers plus internal retained have to be integrated.
He is linking to a post from ZAPLinks Ronald Schmelzer: Who’s Architecting the Cloud?
The essence:
Given that too few cloud computing providers have your business in mind when they architect their solutions, and the ones that have a process-specific business model and approach aren’t concerned with your specific business, it lands upon the laps of enterprise architects within the organization to plan, manage, and govern their own architecture. Once again, the refrain is that SOA is not something you buy, but something you do. Perhaps we can start hearing the same mantra with cloud computing? Or will the cloud succumb to the same short-sighted, market pressure that doomed the ASP model and still plagues SaaS approaches? It’s not up to vendors to answer this question. It’s up to you… the enterprise architect. There are no short-cuts to EA.
Amen.
I admit it, posting was on hold for quite a while due to heavy workload and summer vacation. Now again some links about one of the topics I am interested in.
The Datacenter as Computer is a must-read for anyone interested in the topic, written by Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle of Google. And it is easy to read (it took me just two afternoons on the beach…). Download the PDF here.
Michael Manos of Microsoft on their Datacenter vision: Our Vision for Generation 4 Modular Data Centers – One way of Getting it just right . .
The AWS blog is always worth stopping by to see what is going on at Amazon. Good stuff from July 13: Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and CloudWatch Resources
I believe Jeff Barr (who is also writing on the AWS Blog) is collecting links on AWS and related tools as awsbuzz on delicious. Recommended to follow.
Arstechnica: Google reveals plans for Chrome cloud synchronization. This is not really surprising, isn´t it?
And Google is beating on the bush with “Going Google” and migrating away from e.g. Lotus Notes. I believe this is just for Mail and Calendar, not for Applications. Make up your mind yourself.
Oldie, but Goldie. By Dave Winer. From 2003, but still fresh.
Rather than saying “I know it when I see it” I wanted to list all the known features of weblog software, but more important, get to the heart of what a weblog is, and how a weblog is different from a Wiki, or a news site managed with software like Vignette or Interwoven. I draw from my experience developing and using weblog software (Manila, Radio UserLand) and using competitive products such as Blogger and Movable Type.
A few days ago, Stefan joined a rant of Peter Williams on Yahoo! Pipes lack of a text representation:
While for many models (and programs, and anything in between) having a visual representation is nice when you want to read (or view) it, visual authoring sucks in the vast majority of cases. Sadly, being able to efficiently edit something in a text editor, with versioning and diff support and so on is in general not what impresses those who make purchasing decisions.
This is so true.
One more day, and he links to a great presentation on Pipes and the Y! Query Language. Says Abel Avram in the post that directs to the presentation by Jonathan Trevor , captured at QCon SF 2008 (53 mins):
Yahoo Pipes uses a visual tool to specify a series of pipes through which input data flows and is filtered and processed in various ways. There are many data sources like personal data, CSV, feeds, web pages, services like Flick, Yahoo Search, and others. Processing is done through operators like: Filter, Loop, Regex, Sort, Union, and others. The result is shown in a web page, a feed, or given to an application. The service runs in Yahoo’s cloud, is free and does not offer security protection for sensitive data since anyone can copy and run a pipe made by someone else.
YQL is similar to Pipes but uses a textual textual language and can process both Yahoo web services data and any structured data with an URL. It has an SQL like syntax with three statements: SELECT, SHOW, DESC. This approach is more powerful and the applications created are protected.
Thanks, this is what a lot of people are looking for.
Felix Salmon in Wired 17.03: Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street:
For five years, Li’s formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.
His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much money—that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.
Then the model fell apart. Cracks started appearing early on, when financial markets began behaving in ways that users of Li’s formula hadn’t expected. The cracks became full-fledged canyons in 2008—when ruptures in the financial system’s foundation swallowed up trillions of dollars and put the survival of the global banking system in serious peril.
…
The damage was foreseeable and, in fact, foreseen. In 1998, before Li had even invented his copula function, Paul Wilmott wrote that “the correlations between financial quantities are notoriously unstable.” Wilmott, a quantitative-finance consultant and lecturer, argued that no theory should be built on such unpredictable parameters. And he wasn’t alone. During the boom years, everybody could reel off reasons why the Gaussian copula function wasn’t perfect. Li’s approach made no allowance for unpredictability: It assumed that correlation was a constant rather than something mercurial. Investment banks would regularly phone Stanford’s Duffie and ask him to come in and talk to them about exactly what Li’s copula was. Every time, he would warn them that it was not suitable for use in risk management or valuation.
…In finance, you can never reduce risk outright; you can only try to set up a market in which people who don’t want risk sell it to those who do. But in the CDO market, people used the Gaussian copula model to convince themselves they didn’t have any risk at all, when in fact they just didn’t have any risk 99 percent of the time. The other 1 percent of the time they blew up. Those explosions may have been rare, but they could destroy all previous gains, and then some.
…
In the world of finance, too many quants see only the numbers before them and forget about the concrete reality the figures are supposed to represent. They think they can model just a few years’ worth of data and come up with probabilities for things that may happen only once every 10,000 years. Then people invest on the basis of those probabilities, without stopping to wonder whether the numbers make any sense at all.
As Li himself said of his own model: “The most dangerous part is when people believe everything coming out of it.”
One learning: always read the fine print, folks.
Microsoft Research investigating Cloud Computing Futures:
To create novel data center solutions, designs must be based on comprehensive optimization of all attributes, rather than gradually accruing incremental changes based on current technologies and best practices. The Cloud Computing Futures team is tasked to invent on a large scale. Our goal is to reduce data center costs by four-fold or greater, including power consumption, while accelerating deployment and increasing adaptability and resilience to failures.
Great claim. Let´s see what Microsoft brings along. (via)
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