Interesting. I thought that Big Data was a silver bullet, a magic jinni, a miracle, etc. The write up reports that “far too much handcrafted work — what data scientists call “data wrangling,” “data munging” and “data janitor work” — is still required.”
Reports state that that the internet is running out of space – but is this really a problem, and do we have to worry about it?
Reports this week have claimed that the internet is in danger of becoming “full” because the number of internet connections rose above a crucial limit. A small number of sites could have been taken momentarily offline by the issue with the infrastructure supporting parts of the internet.
The issue revolved around a limit on the number of concurrent connections made to routers that underpin the internet. These operate in a similar manner to home routers spreading data about the global internet, rather than simply within a single address.
“Old hardware that is at least five years past its end-of-life sulked, because it ran out of memory,” explained James Blessing, chair of the Internet Service Providers Association, which has close to 300 members across the UK.
Data integration from an old system to a new system is coded for trouble. The system swallowing the data is guaranteed to have indigestion and the only way to relieve the problem is by burping. Chez Brochez has dealt with his own share of data integration issues and in his article, “Tips and Tricks For Optimizing Oracle Endeca Data Ingestion” he details some of the best way burp.
“It’s like the boiling frog,” Snowden tells me. “You get exposed to a little bit of evil, a little bit of rule-breaking, a little bit of dishonesty, a little bit of deceptiveness, a little bit of disservice to the public interest, and you can brush it off, you can come to justify it. But if you do that, it creates a slippery slope that just increases over time, and by the time you’ve been in 15 years, 20 years, 25 years, you’ve seen it all and it doesn’t shock you. And so you see it as normal. And that’s the problem, that’s what the Clapper event was all about. He saw deceiving the American people as what he does, as his job, as something completely ordinary. And he was right that he wouldn’t be punished for it, because he was revealed as having lied under oath and he didn’t even get a slap on the wrist for it. It says a lot about the system and a lot about our leaders.”
Google Investing Billions to Get Billions. Obviously.
I read “5 Google Projects That Will Pave the Future.” The title confused me. I think the author wanted me to think that Google was paving the way to the future. What I interpreted the title to mean is that Google wants to cover the future with Google’s own digital macadam.
The point of the write up is that Google is doing some big, speculative projects. Bell Labs used to do this, but without the fanfare. But there is a public relations and marketing battle underway among the giant companies that seek to monopolize markets if not the “future.”
The write up mentions Project Loon (the big balloons that will deliver Internet access to folks without the benefit of non balloon methods), Calico (this is the live forever stuff that recently experienced the departure of a nanotech self assembler due to some differing opinions), robots (mobile, smart gizmos that entrances the folks at DARPA), self driving cars (more time to surf the Web and consume ads in a vehicle), and DeepMind (more of the artificial intelligence hoo hah).
Good stuff for those who consumed science fiction, Star Trek, and Star Wars. The only problem is that those billions have to come from someplace. That’s a point overlooked in the Loon plus four article.
IBM Buzz Equals Revenues: The Breakthrough Assumption
I am no wizard of finance. I have kept track of money for my Cub Scout troop. I do understand this chart from Google Finance:
The blue column shows that revenue is going nowhere, maybe even trending down. The red line shows IBM’s profit margin which is flat. And the gold bar presents IBM’s operating income. Notice that it is flat. The flat lines are achieved by cost cutting, selling off dead end businesses, and introducing innovations like offices an employee has to sign up to use.
