Archive for the ‘Opinions’ Category

A worm in the ol’ Apple!

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

A global supply manager working for Apple has been charged in a US federal grand jury indictment for wire fraud, kickbacks and money laundering, and is also facing a civil suit from Apple itself.

According to a report by the San Jose Mercury News, 37 year old Paul Shin Devine of Sunnyvale, California was named in the 23 count indictment along with Andrew Ang of Singapore. (more…)

Apple is ruthless

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

During last week’s iPhone leak saga, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, reached out to Gizmodo with a story: The morning of the iPad launch, an engineer showed Woz an iPad for two minutes. For this he was fired.

Sony gives floppy drives a death blow

Monday, April 26th, 2010

The days of the 3.5-inch floppy disk are now officially numbered.

Sony, which boasts 70 percent of the anemic market, announced Friday that it would end Japanese sales of the ancient storage medium in March 2011, according to a report in the Mainichi Daily newspaper.

The 3.5-inch floppy was a ubiquitous and necessary component for storing and transferring files between personal computers for nearly three decades. Sony pioneered the 3.5-inch floppy disk in 1981, eventually replacing the 5.25-inch floppy disk that had previously been the popular storage format.

However, as the size of files and programs grew, the floppy disk was pushed aside by inexpensive and larger-format storage medium. Thanks to the creation of storage methods such as CDs, DVDs, Zip, and USB drives, Sony saw its Japanese sales of floppies decline from a record 47 million disks in fiscal 2002 to 12 million in fiscal 2009.

Most other floppy disk manufacturers had long since pulled out of the market, and Sony itself has already ceased sales to most of its overseas markets.

Certainly the writing had been on the walls for years. With the release of the iMac in 1998, Apple was the first computer maker to take the plunge and eliminate the floppy completely. Dell followed suit in 2003 when it dropped the floppy as standard equipment on one of its Dimension desktops.

I remember when the HDFD drives came out; I couldn’t afford to by a 10 pack of diskettes, they were $80.00 a box (a lot of money for a middle school kid). :ast time I purchased a pack of diskettes they were around $5.00. I guess it won’t be long before flash drives get to that price and they will be the media of choice (which is now DVD’s).

Don’t let Vendor Hype Take You Down the Wrong Road

Monday, February 15th, 2010

To identify the right CRM solutions for your business, you first need to understand what CRM is. Customer Relationship Management is a way of doing business and it requires a strategy from which you will define processes that can be supported by people and software.

Where most folks get it wrong is by confining CRM to the sales organization, or customer service or marketing. The fact is, each of those areas is a critical part of CRM and there could even be an impact in some of your back office groups as well. (more…)

What does CRM stand for anyway

Monday, February 15th, 2010

We’ve all heard acronyms thrown around at one time or another. They are a way of life today, and not likely to go away anytime soon. It’s hard for the average person to keep up. When you hear the lingo flying around, you might be thinking to yourself, am I the only one that doesn’t know what this stands for. You are not alone. There are a number of people, me included, that often don’t have any idea what all these acronym’s stand for and are too embarrassed to ask for further definition. One such acronym that has been around for years is CRM. So just what does CRM stand for? (more…)

Scope of Artificial Intelligence in Business

Monday, February 15th, 2010

Within the corporate world, A.I. is widely used for complex problem-solving and decision-support techniques in real-time business applications. The business applicability of A.I. techniques is spread across functions ranging from finance management to forecasting and production.

In the fiercely competitive and dynamic market scenario, decision-making has become fairly complex and latency is inherent in many processes. In addition, the amount of data to be analyzed has increased substantially. AI technologies help enterprises reduce latency in making business decisions, minimize fraud and enhance revenue opportunities. (more…)

Artificial Intelligence

Monday, February 15th, 2010

The modern definition of artificial intelligence (or AI) is “the study and design of intelligent agents” where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximizes its chances of success.

John McCarthy, who coined the term in 1956, defines it as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.” Other names for the field have been proposed, such as computational intelligence, synthetic intelligence or computational rationality. (more…)

Data Mining Promises To Dig Up New Drugs

Monday, February 15th, 2010

A robot scientist that can make informed guesses about how effective different chemical compounds will be at fighting different diseases could revolutionize the pharmaceutical industry by developing more effective treatments more cheaply and quickly than current methods. (more…)

Electronic Health Records Need Better Monitoring

Monday, February 15th, 2010

The push is on for health care providers to make the switch to electronic health records but it is hard to tell how well these complex health information technology systems are being implemented and used, writes a health informatics researcher at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston in a Feb. 3 commentary in JAMA, The Journal of the American (more…)

Questions About Java’s Future

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

Oracle Corp.’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems marks a strange step back to the future of computer industry that raises questions about the outlook for Sun’s hardware, Java software and the database giant itself.

To date, the $22 billion Oracle has defined itself by a simple, bold statement. “We are the world’s largest enterprise software company,” it claims in the opening of its latest annual report. (more…)

Sun/Oracle merger: why the public sector should worry

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

Oracle Corporation’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems should worry the public sector because the enlarged entity could lead to price hikes and “vendor lock-in”, according to an IT analyst.

Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director, public sector IT, Ovum, told FutureGov that the deal will hold appeal to some public sector agencies because the new company can offer an “application to disk solution”, which may be seen as a lower risk approach to IT procurement. (more…)

Innovation First of Greenville ready to re-create itself

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

Innovation First International makes a variety of products, including Hexbug toys such as the Nano.
G.J. McCARTHY/DMN

Innovation First International makes a variety of products, including Hexbug toys such as the Nano.

Tony Norman’s company in Greenville looks like the robotics wing of Santa’s workshop. The president and CEO of Innovation First oversees an operation that cranks out everything from educational and toy store robots to server racks and LCD monitor mounts.

Video: See the Hexbug in action

News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Dallas Business News (9 December 2009)
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/vitindex.html?nl

http://snipurl.com/tmlmh

Project Looking Glass

Saturday, November 7th, 2009

Sun Microsystems in the first half of this decade, created a project called Looking Glass.  This was an inovative project for creating a 3D desktop.  Unfortunately the project died in 2006 and there hasn’t been any work on the project since then.

This is very unvoftunit since it lead to several new technologies including several innovations that Apple is using today in there latest OS.

Take a look at this

Thoughts on the Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal

Monday, October 26th, 2009

O’Reilly Media Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:51 AM PDT

Yesterday, the new media team at the White House announced via the Associated Press that whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal, the open source content management system. That Drupal implementation is in turn running on a Red Hat Linux system with Apache, MySQL and the rest of the LAMP stack. Apache Solr is the new White House search engine. This move is obviously a big win for open source …

A Better Air-Traffic-Control System

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

After Air France Flight 447 crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in June, seven hours elapsed before air-traffic controllers realized it was missing, delaying search and rescue efforts and bewildering air travelers over how a jumbo jet could be lost in an age when even simple cellphones can pinpoint positions. (more…)