Updated: 2012-01-30 18:32:12
MIT’s Center for Civic Media has a number of exciting upcoming events focusing on, well, civic media, citizen journalism, and other related topics. During this Thursday’s lunch, Jeff Moriarty will talk about digital initiatives at The Boston Globe. (RSVP for food at least 24 hours prior to the event via the form on the event [...]
Updated: 2012-01-29 20:42:31
bunnie Huang, who got in a bit of a quagmire a few years back when hacking an Xbox while an MIT student, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (commonly known as the EFF) are coordinating a petition to the Library of Congress to attempt to change the part of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA) that [...]
Updated: 2012-01-25 16:47:59
I believe IT departments should support and encourage departmental analytics efforts, where “support” and “encourage” are not synonyms for “control”, “dominate”, “overwhelm”, or even “tame”. A big part of that is: Let, and indeed help, departments have the data they want, when they want it, served with blazing performance. Three things that absolutely should NOT [...]
Updated: 2012-01-24 14:42:34
Microsoft is launching SQL Server 2012 on March 7. An IM chat with a reporter resulted, and went something like this. Reporter: [Care to comment]? CAM: SQL Server is an adequate product if you don’t mind being locked into the Microsoft stack. For example, the ColumnStore feature is very partial, given that it can’t be [...]
Updated: 2012-01-23 14:29:06
Department-level adoption of analytic technology isn’t the exception; it’s the norm. Reasons include: Many analytic challenges are inherently departmental. In many cases, central IT control of analytics isn’t needed. Departments move ahead without central approval or involvement because they can. That said, arguments for centralizing analytic technology include: A lot of data is used by [...]
Updated: 2012-01-18 17:02:59
SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is getting blasted all over the Internet. Even so, one of its major dangers has not yet been widely discussed. People seem to realize that SOPA can create censorship by governments, or businesses, or as collateral damage when governments and businesses pursue other interests. But they may not yet grasp [...]
Updated: 2012-01-18 07:57:09
Couchbase in general, and CouchDB project founder Damien Katz in particular, are to some extent walking away from CouchDB. That is: The Couchbase product will not be upward compatible with CouchDB. Couchbase will no longer offer a CouchDB distribution, and is doing the natural and responsible thing, namely … … donating to the Apache Foundation [...]
Updated: 2012-01-18 05:28:30
I frequently badger my clients to tell their story in the form of a company blog, where they can say what needs saying without being restricted by the rules of other formats. KXEN actually listened, and put up a pair of CTO posts that make the company story a lot clearer. Excerpts from the first [...]
Updated: 2012-01-17 10:44:41
In case you missed it, Sarah Lacy has launched Pando Daily, aka “Spawn of TechCrunch”. It has a clear mission statement, which she phrased as the site-of-record for that startup root-system and everything that springs up from it, cycle-after-cycle and mentor/investor/board member Mike Arrington simply called to be the paper of record for Silicon Valley [...]
Updated: 2012-01-17 08:04:58
This post is part of a short series on the history of analytics, covering: Historical notes on analytics — the pre-computer era Historical notes on analytic terminology (in which many terms used in this post are defined) Historical notes on analytics — departmental adoption (this post) What set off my “history of analytics” posting kick [...]
Updated: 2012-01-17 08:01:20
This post is part of a short series on the history of analytics, covering: Historical notes on analytics — the pre-computer era (this post) Historical notes on analytic terminology Historical notes on analytics — departmental adoption Sometimes, what people describe as being “New, new, new!!!” in analytics has actually been happening since before they were [...]
Updated: 2012-01-17 04:12:00
A correspondent today asked about illuminate Solutions, noting that its website is down. I put the question out to Twitter, and was messaged by an extremely reliable source, who had heard that illuminate has shut down and is in receivership. illuminate’s website and CTO blog that I previously linked both appear to be rather dead [...]
Updated: 2012-01-14 23:19:03
(Forgive me, but I appreciate the humor in Too Big to Know at Harvard.) David Weinberger, an appreciator of librarians and information science and prolific author and thinker on related topics, will speak about his new book Too Big to Know on Tuesday, January 24, most likely somewhere at Harvard University. The Berkman Center’s page [...]
Updated: 2012-01-11 01:32:39
Oracle announced its Big Data Appliance. Specs may be found in the Oracle Big Data Appliance press release. Beyond that: The most important software on the Oracle Big Data Appliance is a full set of Cloudera Enterprise code. Oracle will do Tier 1 Cloudera/Hadoop support, while Cloudera handles Tiers 2 and 3. The key spec [...]
Updated: 2012-01-10 22:23:22
Predictably, I wasn’t pre-briefed on the details of Oracle’s Big Data Appliance announcement today, and an inquiry to partner Cloudera doesn’t happen to have been immediately answered.* But anyhow, it’s clear from coverage by Larry Dignan and Derrick Harris that Oracle’s Big Data Appliance includes: Some version of Cloudera Manager (I’m guessing more or less [...]
Updated: 2012-01-10 05:55:08
Splunk is announcing the Splunk 4.3 point release. Before discussing it, let’s recall a few things about Splunk, starting with: Splunk is first and foremost an analytic DBMS … … used to manage logs and similar multistructured data. Splunk’s DML (Data Manipulation Language) is based on text search, not on SQL. Splunk has extended its [...]
Updated: 2012-01-09 01:35:57
Recently, I observed that Big Data terminology is seriously broken. It is reasonable to reduce the subject to two quasi-dimensions: Bigness — Volume, Velocity, size Structure — Variety, Variability, Complexity given that High-velocity “big data” problems are usually high-volume as well.* Variety, variability, and complexity all relate to the simply-structured/poly-structured distinction. But the conflation should [...]
Updated: 2012-01-04 15:16:01
The SLA New England Chapter* and SLA Pharmaceutical and Health Technologies Division are organizing a free brown bag lunch about, well, Text Mining, Query Formulation and the Role of Information Professionals on Tuesday, January 10, 12-1:30 p, at Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, Suite 1100, 75 Kneeland St Boston MA. Register by [...]
